Govt set to tackle truancy with ‘traffic light system’
The Government has promised to tackle a “truancy crisis” by making schools report daily attendance data and creating a “traffic light system” for schools and parents of absent children.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Associate Education Minister David Seymour visited Cardinal McKeefry School in Wellington yesterday to announced the policy programme aimed at bringing down high school truancy rates. “The numbers are shameful There’s no other way to describe it,” Luxon said, of truancy rates.
New Zealand has comparatively poor school attendance rates, with 45.9% of students being in school 90% of the time as of last year. This was 69.5% in 2015, and compares with 2022 figures of 75% in England, and 49.9% in Australia.
“It is not easy to learn at school, but it’s impossible to learn if you’re not at school, and that’s why the Government has committed to getting kids back to school regularly, with a target of 80% of kids attending regu- larly by the end of the decade,” Seymour said.
He said the Government had begun a series of policy changes, including the publication of weekly attendance data from the second school term this year, a communications campaign to improve awareness about the importance of school from the second term, updating guidance to assist schools and parents in determining when a child was well enough for school, and “clarifying” expectations about attendance for school boards.
The public education campaign would be nationally co-ordinated but locally delivered.
The new health advice would give parents a “decision tree” to help them determine whether children should attend schools, based on symptoms, Seymour said.
Later in the year, he would take to Cabinet further proposals such as daily reporting of truancy from 2025 and a “traffic light system” that had “clear obligations for when a student is not attending”.
“I can understand why there’s a lot of emphasis because it’s something that certainly generates discussion, but I think it needs to be placed in the context of a wider range of initiatives the Government’s taking.
Data for school attendance for term four of 2023 will be published on Friday.