Parents urged to improve role in children’s school attendance
An Invercargill high school principal wants parents of her pupils to think about the overall impact truancy is having on their children’s futures.
Robyn Hickman, of Aurora College, has spoken in the wake of figures showing her school had the highest number of referrals to the attendance service for unjustified absences in 2014 [9.2 per cent of its school roll] in Southland and Otago.
Hickman said she wanted parents to do everything in their power to ensure their children had a strong attendance record at the school.
However, parents were often not helping the situation by failing to answer school phone calls and texts asking why their children were absent.
When parents did not respond the school was required to list the absence as an unjustified absence, even if the pupil had a legitimate reason for being away.
She indicated a lot of the parents of Aurora College pupils did not trust authorities.
‘‘A lot of our parents have negative experiences with bureaucracy and they tend to treat the need for record keeping or data as an intrusion.’’
Many parents also believed absences from school was a minor issue and did not realise the overall effect it had on their children’s futures, she said.
Her school, which had a lot of pupils living in financially struggling families, did a lot of work to keep pupils from being truant, but it was an ongoing battle. Among the measures taken, Hickman said the school posted leaflets to parents once a month saying how many times their children had been absent and a letter saying they wanted their children’s attendance to be greater than 90 per cent because of the strong link between achievement and attendance.
‘‘Put bluntly, if you’re not in class you can’t pass,’’ the latest letter signed by Hickman says.
If a pupil’s lower than 90 teacher set improvements.
The school worked with attendance service staff to try to get longterm truant children back to school.
And if pupils disappeared from school during the day, attendance service staff were alerted and it was not uncommon for them to find the pupils in city parks and deliver them back to class, she said.
‘‘The fact is our figures still aren’t something to be proud of. I dread to think what they would be if we didn’t undertake these sort of measures.’’
The school also rewarded those pupils with high attendance rates.
More than 50 of the 384 pupils at Aurora College had a 100 per cent attendance rate in term one and they were given a certificate and $5 canteen voucher, Hickman said.
An attendance service report for Otago and Southland schools linked poverty with high rates of truancy, with Hickman saying attendance at school was often not a priority for families dealing with the effects of poverty in their lives. attendance was per cent, their
targets for