Reaching truancy target a ‘struggle’

A target to raise New Zealand’s ‘‘woeful’’ school attendance rates won’t be met without better information-sharing and support services, an attendance service provider warns.

Less than 60% of students are attending school regularly, after numbers started to drop in 2015, and the number ‘‘chronically absent’’ has nearly doubled to 8.7%, a Government report found in March.

In May, the Government announced a $40 million fund aimed at helping to get 70% of students regularly attending school in two years.

However, the general manager of South Island attendance service provider Te Ora Hou O¯ tautahi, Jono Campbell, said reaching the target would be a huge challenge.

Many referrals to the attendance service (which responds to truancy referrals) were complex and ‘‘incredibly time-consuming’’, requiring multi-agency intervention or support, he said.

The service had been underfunded for years, but ‘‘chucking more money’’ at it, and at schools, would not solve truancy on its own, Campbell said.

The Christchurch-based charity is contracted by the Ministry of Education to help provide the attendance service in Canterbury, the top of the South Island and the West Coast.

The ministry had not monitored outcomes, which could have helped to prevent children disengaging from school, Campbell said. Schools and attendance officers were too stretched to share the information.

Understanding the story of the young person, family and school was necessary to find out where things had broken down, and health assessments were needed to identify barriers to attendance, he said.

A Cabinet report found that 57.7% of students were attending 90% of classes in 2019 – the Government’s measure of regular attendance.

The vice-president of secondary principals’ group SPANZ, Scott Haines, said the statistic was ‘‘woeful’’. ‘‘We’ve seen [international] academic rankings dropping for New Zealand yearon-year, and now we’re seeing our attendance rate dropping commensurately, and I can’t help but think there is a correlation.’’

Schools, communities and government agencies needed to act collectively to help rebuild the attendance service and share best practice.

‘‘Firmer metrics and consequences’’ were also needed for non-attendance, with ‘‘parentalcondoned non-attendance’’ seeming to have added to cases of ‘‘classic truancy’’, said Haines, who has been visiting schools up and down the country, studying their approaches to truancy.

‘‘Schools are pulling every lever to try and get kids back to classrooms . . . from stick to carrot, to attendance draws.

‘‘There is not one strategy that is working ... it is a combination of those things ...’’

The Ministry of Education said the Government’s attendance and engagement strategy, launched last month, provided the framework for further regional and national measures.

The ministry was developing local responses with communities, schools, and kura and early learning services.