School attendance vital
Many hurdles to clear in battle for best education outcomes
citizens are not going to succeed. Unless there is a significant and uniform upturn in school attendance (and inducements don’t really make change happen — it has to come from the heart) nothing is going to alter except for a continuing diminution of educational outcomes.
Attendance and punctuality habits must improve if younger indigenous Australians are to go anywhere near emulating the achievements of their elders. Problem is Territory-wide The issue of school attendance and punctuality is not limited to remote areas. It also impacts on town and city schools.
A matter of real concern in many schools, remote and urban, is that of ‘‘lateness’’. Sig- nificant numbers of children and students have an ingrained habit of being regularly late to school.
A student who is 15 minutes late each day, misses out on 9.5 school days (nearly a fortnight) each year. It’s time that children can ill afford to lose! The early part of each day is key learning time.
One empathises with children who miss school because of illness.
There is however, a lot of absenteeism that occurs for reasons of a non- medical nature. Children miss school for a myriad of reasons — and all disrupt learning.
It may be a case of birthdays, relations visiting, extended camping trips, taking extra days before and immediately after school hol- idays, adding to weekends — and so on. When lateness and absence are added together, there are for many children, a significant number of school days and weeks missed each year.
This takes from education and learning opportunities. Skewed holidays In the Territory, school attendance is often affected by the timing of family holidays. During school holiday periods airfares are at their peak with accommodation costs considerably hyped. It’s very expensive to travel away during school holidays.
Many Territory families take their holidays during school time because to do so is considerably cheaper.
This is an economic decision and one easily under- stood — however it impacts on school attendance and student learning opportunities. Could airlines, in the interests of education, be persuaded to up costs of travel during school term time and decrease airfares and packages during the student holiday season? That would solve a myriad of school attendance issues. System-wide challenge Irregularity of student attendance in our schools is a sad negative, one contributing significantly to reduced student learning outcomes.
Truancy, absence and sporadic attendance have a deleterious and challenging impact on far too many Territory schools and their students. It can be fixed but that will take courage.