This year my Y10 Deans and I have spent more time than ever on student attendance – yet it feels like the harder we work the bigger the problem grows! Every week we print out a list of Y10 students whose attendance is at or below 85 per cent. 2 years ago the list fitted on a page – now it runs to 2 pages. At the top of the page are a small number of students whose attendance is below 60 per cent some of whom have essentially stopped attending school, often due to habitual school refusal which may be linked to anxiety or depression or due to parent supported truancy. In the middle are a significant group of students who have adopted a 4 day working week which puts them at 80 per cent attendance and below that are lots of students whose attendance was great in Term 1 but seem to struggle to get to school when the darker, colder days of Term 2 arrive. I know that we are not alone and I know our data is not the worst, the media is describing a truancy crisis with more than 60,000 students chronically absent from school.1 Our Deans spend a lot of time thinking about how we can create more positive outcomes for these students because the research shows that every day matters. Education Ministry chief economist Andrew Webber wanted to know just how much school a student could miss before it started to affect achievement. His findings were published in February 2020 in He Whakaaro: What is the relationship between attendance and attainment?2 He concluded, ‘This is evidence against the idea of a ‘safe’ level of non-attendance, where students do not experience negative impacts.’
Because of this we must all continue to work hard on ensuring our students and whānau understand the importance of being at school every day. Whilst I cannot claim to have carried out a scientific study, these are some things I have noticed that might be helpful: Attendance is a habit: Many of the students who have the lowest attendance statistics in Y9 and Y10 also had poor attendance at primary school. According to our truancy officer, this was often not addressed at the early stages and had become habitual by the time students reached high school age. For all of us, paying attention to attendance data and having an honest conversation with students and their whānau early on is critical. The most challenging cases are those where parents explain absence, often using illness as the reason – building relationships are essential to understanding the issues for these students. Is being youngest in Year level a factor? We have a spreadsheet of students who are part of our Rock On Process (a partnership with Police Youth Aid which brings together a number of
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agencies to support students and their whānau with attendance.) When I put dates of birth on to that spreadsheet I noticed that a significant number of these students were very young for their cohort. I have no idea whether this is statistically significant nationally, or what universal challenges being youngest in cohort creates that lead to poor attendance but this may be a factor to bear in mind when deciding whether to place a new entrant student in Year 0 or Year 1. Transport can be the issue: Studies in the US have shown that attendance is significantly better for students who travel by school bus. For students placed on our Rock On Process, sometimes being visited by truancy or Youth Aid Officers and brought to school improves attendance and highlights the fact that they live too far from school to walk and reliable, affordable transport is often lacking. At a recent FGC meeting, we discussed how to fund a bus pass for a student at a cost of $35 a month – I noted with some irony that if we added together the hourly rates of the 6 professionals who had devoted an hour and a half of their time to the meeting we could have funded the bus pass for 6 months. School refusal is on the increase: We always have at least 1 or 2 students a year whose families have all the resources and the desire to get them to school and yet are unable to do so – in my school this is increasing. My best recommendation here is a short book called Overcoming School Refusal by Joanne Garfi3 who distinguishes school refusal from truancy, ‘Children who develop school refusal display severe emotional and cognitive stress in the face of attending school.’ So how do we take a strengths based, solution focussed approach to attendance? As with everything in education I believe it is all about relationships. Having an ongoing conversation with families struggling with attendance is the only way to create change. When starting conversations with students and their whānau when school is not going well, I always start with the student’s strengths – if a student struggles to identify these then a pack of strengths cards (NZIWR do a good set) can be a great starting point. Just spread them out and ask the student to choose 3. Last week a student who had been running away from home and school picked ‘Adventurous’ as a strength and this led to conversations about how she could have adventure in her life without putting herself at risk. To unpack the issues behind poor attendance, the conversation really needs to be with the tamariki or rangatahi – whilst the whānau may know about the stomach aches only the child can explain what led to the anxiety. These questions are the basis for the conversations we have:
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What are your strengths? Ask whānau to talk about the student’s strengths – for some students they may not hear positives a lot in their day to day if things are not going well. ■■ Think about a time when school was going well – what was it like? ■■ When was that? What happened to change things? ■■ What is happening at the moment? At school? At home? ■■ What do you think about in the morning before school that stops you being able to come? ■■ Ask a scaling question: If 0 is when school is going really badly and 10 is when school was going really well what number are you on at the moment? ■■ If the student answers 4: What is one thing you can do to get to 5 or 6? What else? ■■ What ‘self-talk’ could be useful when you are struggling to get to school ie ‘My friends miss me when I am not at school’ ‘I want to be a ____ in future and I need to be good at maths for that . . . ’ ■■ What can your parents do to help? What can school do? ■■ How will we know when things are getting better? ■■ ■■
This conversation then forms the basis for a plan with a date set for a check-in and follow up (which should happen whether things improve or get worse), rewards for change and external support for whānau if required. Working on student attendance is hard work – sometimes with no immediate reward and sometimes things get worse before they get better. This explains why my whakatauki for this mahi is Kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawanui: Be strong, be brave, be steadfast. References 1 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/truancy-crisismore-than-60000-students-chronically-absent-fromschool/6TXZWOLAE6WTO35J7CGKHIOOQ4/ 2 https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/ he-whakaaro-what-is-the-relationship-between-attendance-andattainment 3 Garfi, J, Overcoming School Refusal: A practical guide for teachers, counsellors, caseworkers and parents. Australian Academic Press 2018 https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/123514144/markedabsent-the-attendance-freefall-in-new-zealands-schools
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