Families must be found before truancy is tackled, says education officer

An Auckland truancy officer says intervention often comes too late, with many children falling through the cracks or their families missing from the system.

The Education Review Office reported this on Wednesday This year, 80,000 children were chronically absent in the second semesteroverall the worst of the four school terms in terms of attendance.

This meant that one in 10 students missed more than 30 percent of class time that semester, double the number a decade ago, the report said.

Auckland City education services manager Karyl Puklowski said Checkpoint they had seen the crisis coming for “some time”, but the root causes of the problem were complex.

The latest emergency response figures provide some clarity about the extent of the problem, she says, but there are still problems with the system.

Referrals to childcare services were dependent on schools reporting absences, and resolving a case “takes time”, she said.

“There are a lot of layers to organize. It’s a bit like an onion: they have to peel off each layer at that point.”

Read more:

In reality, shelter services often struggled to find and connect with families.

There were limited resources to search for them, and then they had to build a relationship, she said.

“The only way we’re going to solve this is by connecting with whānau and their families, and through that connection, find out what the concerns are… and what’s needed to support this young person to get back to school and go to school.” , and have stabilized turnout.”

Attendance services could access Department of Education data to check whether students had moved and enrolled in schools elsewhere, but this was not always accurate, she said.

“Addresses can often be out of date. We may refer a case to us with an Auckland address, but they may live in Christchurch and the last time they lived in Auckland was a number of years ago.”

Such information needed to be shared more widely, although on-call services often worked together, she added.

More work needed to be done in schools around student attendance and engagement, although attendance officers had been in place since early 2023, she said.

“That will take time, but it was a good strategy that will build what is needed within a school to manage attendance.”

On-call services needed to be brought in much earlier — as early as the first year, she said.

‘We are often called in too late, because the patterns have become entrenched.

“I don’t call it truancy, I don’t call it unexcused absenteeism, I call it non-involvement. They’re just not concerned with education. And that takes a lot of work… and there are often no options available to the young person when he or she is an age at which he is no longer engaged.”

Government focus wrong – Labor, teachers

The government’s approach has drawn criticism from Opposition and Labor leader Chris Hipkins, who said the government was targeting children who were only “moderately absent”.

“These are kids who may have been away 11, 12, 13 days a year, which means they’re not meeting the 90 percent attendance goal, but they’re not chronically absent.

“It’s the chronically absent children – and that’s actually a much smaller group of children… that we need to focus our attention on.”

However, Whangārei Primary School principal Pat Newman, speaking on behalf of the teachers’ union, claimed successive governments had failed to tackle the root causes of chronic truancy.

The data was very clear, he said.

“The main reason for chronic absenteeism is socio-economic. That’s what we keep telling government after government.

“If young parents are trying to make ends meet and maybe don’t have the gas to get their kids to school or don’t have enough clothes… then you’re going to have more absenteeism.”

Barriers to getting children into the classroom would disproportionately affect younger (elementary) students, who were naturally more dependent on their parents, Newman said.

He said his school used its own money to address the problem.

“We operate two vans ourselves, at our own expense.

‘We are very lucky that one of the local Caltex stations supplies us with all the petrol, but we pay for the driver and the van – nothing from the ministry or Mr Seymour – and we bring in petrol every day. That includes 25 children who would otherwise not go to school.”

Newman said if Minister David Seymour wanted children in school, the answer was simple: put more money into schools like his.

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.