Why Waikato children are skipping school
Stats suggest school students are stretching out weekends, but Waikato principals say tough home lives are a bigger factor in pupils’ absence from class.
Data released last week by the Ministry of Education shows live attendance percentages across districts, and Fridays have the lowest average attendance rates.
In Waikato, Fridays were consistently about 5% behind the best-attended day of the same week during term one.
For example, in the week starting March 18, top attendance was on Tuesday (86%), and the lowest days were Wednesday (79.4%) and Friday (75.2%). The lowest percentage day by district in term one was 67.9% in Nelson/Marlborough/West Coast.
But it’s not necessarily about the day of the week, said Fairfield College principal Richard Crawford.
Absences often increase on early finish days, rainy days, or around long weekends.
“Our most challenging terms are term two and term three, with the cold weather. It’s when kids usually get sick.”
A recent survey about student absences at the Hamilton school showed reasons including sickness and family responsibilities such as caring for younger siblings or grandparents. “Employment was a factor for some of them. Some of them just find school boring. And that’s something that we’re always trying to improve on.”
Crawford is also lead principal of He Pae Here Kāhui Ako, a group of 23 schools. He said that across those schools, the government’s attendance officers had been “a bit of a game changer”.
“These officers work with the schools to not only help those chronic absentees, but also the kids who have irregular absences. 85-90% attendance for one student might sound high, but it’s actually a fair bit of absence.”
After a shallow dive into the data, new Hamilton Boys’ High School headmaster
Jarred Williams didn’t see much of a weekly trend either. “If we dived deeper you probably would expect Mondays and Fridays would be lower due to it being close to the weekend,” he said.
Williams said absences at Hamilton Boys’ often come down to socio-economic challenges. “Especially at the moment around poverty. These kids in these families have challenges that sometimes become priorities for them,” he said. “There are also some mental health issues for kids. A lot of anxiety around for some of these students. And another challenge is that when kids fall behind on learning they feel embarrassed, and don’t want to feel that in a classroom setting.”
For chronic absences, Williams said the school prefers to work with the whānau.
“The challenge is that disengagement from school. So for us we engage with attendance services, our councillors, to see what the issue is.”
The personal approach works well at Morrinsville Primary as well, which is why principal Shay Noonan is sceptical about central government involvement based on numbers.
“We have our own internal support and we don’t engage with the attendance officers at all... If [a student] isn’t there we ring up the parents and have a chat,” he said.
“If you’ve got genuine relationships with families you’re not going to ring up some stranger for help.”