Jobs keep kids at same school
Groups with highest transience rates have logged the biggest reductions
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Ceducation hildren are staying in the same school more than at any time this decade because more of their parents have got jobs.
Only 0.47 per cent of schoolchildren changed schools more than once last year, making them officially “transient”, down from a peak of 0.65 per cent in 2011 when the worst effects of the global financial crisis coincided with the Christchurch earthquake.
The groups which had the highest transience rates up to 2016 — lowdecile, Ma¯ori and Northland students — have logged the biggest reductions in 2017.
Te Tai Tokerau Principals Association president Pat Newman said the reason was simple — jobs.
“We are starting to get jobs,” he said. “Transience was built out of, quite simply, people not having work, and/or casual work, moving from Dargaville for the kumara to Kerikeri for the fruit picking.
“What we have now is a lot more in work, so they are not shifting.”
Although the national unemployment rate ticked up a fraction from 4.4 per cent in March to 4.5 per cent in June, the 4.5 per cent annual average for the year to June was the lowest since just before the financial crisis hit in 2008, when it was 3.8 per cent.
The Ma¯ori unemployment rate is still double the national average, at 9.5 per cent, but it has fallen more than in any other ethnic group in the past two years, from 11.4 per cent in the year to June 2016.
And Northland, which has had the
country’s highest unemployment rate for most of the past 30 years and was still the worst with 8.3 per cent unemployed two years ago, has seen its jobless rate drop faster than any other region in the past two years to 5.7 per cent, now below Manawatu¯Whanganui Feeling the pain at the pump? Explore how petrol prices vary around the country at
(6.1 per cent) and Gisborne/Hawke’s Bay (5.9 per cent).
Northland’s school transience rate is still the highest in the country, but plunged the most, from 1.94 per cent in 2016 to 1.67 per cent last year.
“Building has picked up because
the rich in Auckland are now back buying and building houses here, and tourism is picking up,” Newman said.
He said the transience rate at his decile 2 school in Whangarei, Hora Hora School, had dropped by about 25 per cent in the past two years. We talk Warriors and this weekends playoff game after 7am with Tony Kemp.
“We are 80 per cent Ma¯ori, but of those 70 per cent bypass other schools to bring their kids here.”
Transience in the poorest (decile 1) schools peaked in 2016 at 2.78 per cent, but has also dropped the most in the past year, to 2.5 per cent.