Subj : Scariest cause of school non-attendance: Parents who don't care
To   : All
From : News
Date : Tue May 21 2024 12:39 pm

Far from existing in a vacuum, New Zealand's falling school attendance rates
are part of a global trend - and researchers and educators say turning the
ship around will take a monumental effort.


Pop quiz: which country has plummeting school attendance rates, against a
backdrop of long months of online learning during lockdown, rolling teacher
strikes, a youth mental health crisis, and a cost of living crisis?


Is it A) New Zealand, B) Australia, C) England, or D) all of the above?


Listening to politicians, it's easy to believe that the answer is A, and that
New Zealand's falling attendance marks it out as the global class dunce.


The proportion of students who go to school regularly was a near-record low
of 46% in Term 3 last year, rising to 54% in Term 4 (which tends to have
better attendance).


Launching the Government's new attendance strategy in April, Prime Minister
Christopher Luxon called the numbers "shameful".


Associate education minister David Seymour, standing next to him, said: "New
Zealand's attendance is not only bad compared with where we were just a few
years ago, it's bad compared with just about any country we'd like to compare
ourselves with."

The rates have dropped precipitously in the years since Covid-19, following
years of a much gentler, but still steady, decline.


But although New Zealand's overall rates are worse than countries with
similar education systems, they fit a universal pattern of falling attendance
in classrooms around the world.


Data reveals almost identical trends in England and Australia. All three
countries have moved downwards in lockstep for a decade now, and this is
repeated elsewhere, regardless of the schooling system.


Japan - a country known for its adherence to societal norms - reported record
student absence rates in 2023, as did the US.


The standard that many countries, including New Zealand, use for 'regular
attendance' is high. To meet it, a student needs to be present more than 90%
of the time.


The chronic absence rate - attending less than 70% of the time - is much
lower, though this, too, has steadily risen from about 5% in 2011 to 12% last
year.


Even among chronically absent students, many of their absences are recorded
as "justified" - that is, they fit within school policy (for instance,
illness). Others might have "unjustified" absences that include family
holidays during term-time.


The rate of New Zealand students who are actually truant, or simply absent
without explanation, is about 3%.


During Covid, a week of isolating at home, unwell, was enough to shift
students out of the regular attendance bracket. A regular attendance rate of
just 40% was recorded in Term 2 of 2022, when the Omicron variant of Covid
ripped through New Zealand's population.


But declining attendance rates pre-date Covid, and have outlasted its most
acute impacts both here and overseas.

When parents 'stopped believing' every day counts
In England, politicians and educators speak of an attendance "crisis", Sally
Burtonshaw, an associate director at UK public policy agency Public First,
said.


"Both the current Conservative government and the [British] Labour Party have
talked a lot about wanting to address it. But we're really struggling to
identify the interventions that have a significant impact."


Wanting to understand more, Burtonshaw conducted research last year with
parents, who she said "have a large degree of agency and control" over
attendance, especially for primary school children.


In both England and New Zealand, schools and educators have suggested some
parents are simply unaware of how a day off here and there may add up to
non-regular attendance over a school term or year.


But focus groups with parents from a vast range of socio-economic and
geographic backgrounds across England led Burtonshaw to a far more disturbing
conclusion.


Awareness was not the issue - parents knew attendance rates had gone down.
The problem was: they didn't care.


In parents' eyes, the months of school closures and rolling waves of illness
during the acute stage of the pandemic, followed by protracted teacher
strikes, gave the lie to the mantra that 'every day matters', Burtonshaw
found.


"Parents simply didn't believe you could close schools for months and then go
back to insisting that every day of school was essential."


That sentiment was repeated again and again, across the different focus
groups.


"Before Covid, I was all about getting the kids into school. Education was a
major thing," one parent said. "After Covid, I'm not going to lie to you, my
take on attendance now is like, I don't really care anymore. Life's too
short."


In short, the relationship between schools and families in her country was
now "profoundly broken", Burtonshaw wrote.


"It will take a colossal, multi-agency effort to rebuild it."


Launching the New Zealand government's attendance strategy, Seymour seemed to
acknowledge a similar breakdown here.


"I don't think any [New Zealand] government has taken the time to properly
understand . why education is not being valued as much as most people would
hope by so many parents, and actually meet in the middle and find a way to
make education viewed as valuable and relevant again."


Covid also opened families' eyes to alternatives, Burtonshaw said. Lockdowns
were deeply traumatic and stressful for some people, but for others, they
could suddenly see "another way of being", Burtonshaw said.


"Parents spoke to us about the benefits of having their children at home or
how that enabled them to be together more with their family and to prioritise
that time."


That fed into a new, universal acceptance among parents of holidays during
term-time - with the savings to be had on airfares and accommodation outside
of the school holidays vastly outweighing the œ60 (NZD$125) fine that
accompanies non-school-condoned absences in England.


Some families face far more existential issues.


Burtonshaw's focus groups talked about how the cost-of-living crisis had made
even the basics - laundry powder to wash school uniforms, money for the bus -
an insurmountable financial hurdle at times.


She found a "massive increase" in children and adolescents being referred to
youth mental health services was also driving absences, but so too were
changing attitudes to mental health in general.


"We also saw parents who were talking much more about child well-being. They
see that allowing their children to have a day or two off school may well
kind of give them a chance to reset."


Are parents right?


"What is hard is that we know there is a very, very strong correlation
between attendance and attainment," Burtonshaw said.


But a day off here or there? The problem is that "it's very hard to tell
which day is going to matter or not", Burtonshaw said.


"Maybe not every single lesson and every single day feels incredibly
meaningful. I am not saying that schools can't do more. But the data shows
very strongly that schools massively improve educational outcomes versus
those children who don't go."


It can be hard to know where to start, Burtonshaw said.


"A lot of the interventions and the research is quite embryonic. So trying to
understand what works and what we should scale is a real challenge."


Truancy is 'a symptom of a problem'

Kirsten Hancock, an education researcher at The Smith Family charitable trust
in Australia, published a report last year on how low attendance might be
addressed there, after a research tour that included visiting New Zealand and
the USA.


"The issue with attendance is remarkably similar across every jurisdiction
that you look at," Hancock said.


While the direct effects of Covid do not explain the entire picture for any
of the countries she visited, the pandemic "really helped to shine a light",
she said.


"There is more work being done in research, in governments, in schools, to
understand things a bit better and to try some different things."


Student absence is always the symptom of a problem, not the problem itself,
Hancock said.


She identified a similar mix of issues feeding into declining Australian
attendance rates, including the cost of living, "social-emotional safety"
issues like mental health and bullying, and increased appreciation in some
families of time spent together. For some younger children, lockdowns meant
they never formed an attendance habit.


It was clear what doesn't work.


"Punitive approaches to attendance problems are ineffective at best, and
counterproductive at worst," she wrote.


Likewise, reward systems only have a surface-level impact, she said. "If you
have a child who is experiencing some sort of adversity at home, offering an
ice-cream on Friday is not going to address those deeper issues."


Many schools are also taking too long to intervene, she said - waiting until
the end of term to look at absence rates rather than identifying patterns
early on.


Instead, Hancock suggests a proactive, "multi-tiered approach" that tailors
the response to what a student actually needs to get them back to school.


For lower-level absences, fostering a culture of attendance and making school
a welcoming, nice place to be might be enough. Others might need help
addressing learning difficulties, or health conditions such as asthma, that
prevent regular attendance. At the most intensive end of the spectrum, a
multi-agency approach might be the only thing that works: getting a student
and their family into stable, secure housing, for instance.


At a higher level, governments should be gathering data about what schools
are trying and whether it works, so successful initiatives can be rolled out
across the system, Hancock said.


"Schools [already] talk to each other. They might share, well, we tried this
and it worked and we tried this and it didn't work, but collating that
information so that it can be used on a broader level is kind of where that
gap has been."


Despite the focus from politicians on term-time holidays, Hancock's previous
research has found no effect from those types of absences on national
literacy and numeracy scores in Australia.


"I couldn't find any evidence to suggest that students taking holidays during
term-time were suffering academically. There's other research, I think from
Scotland, that has found very similar things."


She suggests that could be because parents are more mindful about making sure
their child catches up on schoolwork afterwards.


"That doesn't happen for other absences. If a kid is off for a week with a
cold or flu, it's kind of viewed as just what happens. It's completely
normal, we'll send them back to school next week."

There's nothing wrong with the New Zealand government's plan to raise
awareness of attendance rates and introduce a 'decision tree' to help parents
decide whether their child is well enough to attend school, Hancock said.


"But it can't be the only thing. That might fix a teeny tiny part of the
problem. So it's those two things, plus all of the other things that need to
happen."


A 'whatever works' approach
That's exactly the approach that schools across Manurewa in South Auckland
have been taking since 2020, when an attendance service based within schools
was first piloted.


Now funded on two-year contracts, the service employs six attendance officers
across 34 schools in the area.


Greenmeadows Intermediate principal Cathy Chalmers, whose school hosts the
service, said it responded to 1300 referrals in 2023. Of those, it managed to
get 90% of children and young people returned to school.


The attendance officers have "built their own reputations", Chalmers said.


"They are part of our community, they're Maori, Pasifika, so that they
connect well with our families, but also because they're school-based, they
also get on really well with schools."


The key is adapting their approach to "whatever works, basically".


Often, the students who are chronically absent come from families mired in
drug and alcohol problems, or struggling with deep poverty. Getting a child
to school falls way down the list of priorities, Chalmers said.


"That's a really, really complex situation that takes quite a wrap-around
approach to get those students back to school."


Officers have worked with some families for years now.


"They do try to keep contact with them to keep their relationship going so
that they can sustain attendance as well."


But most students with irregular attendance are not chronic truants - they
fall somewhere in the 70 to 90 per cent attendance category.

For those students, promoting attendance can work, along with removing as
many barriers as possible, Chalmers said.


Gradually, the school has lifted its regular attendance rate from the mid-40s
- well below even the national average - to about 65%, Chalmers said.


"Everybody's sharpened their focus on it and it's working."


Greenmeadows Intermediate gives certificates to students who meet the regular
attendance mark, and also puts a student's current attendance rate at the top
of the profile page parents see when they log into the school's portal.


That can only take schools so far, though.


"That works for the willing. That works for the parents that read the
newsletters, that works for the parents that care about their child bringing
the certificate home."


She is "very pleased" that the school lunch scheme will continue.


"I absolutely believe that [it] contributed to getting kids returning to
school."


But where the Government has given with one hand, it's taken with the other.


"The other thing that helped us get kids to school was the free transport for
under-12s and, of course, that's gone," she said.

"I'm not being political, but if we're cutting funding to things that get our
students to school to save money for tax benefits, for our families who are
really struggling with poverty, I'm sure that the tax benefit they're going
to get is not going to equal what they would have to pay for transport and
lunch."


Chalmers herself is taking some time out of class, on a term-long sabbatical.


Her research topic? Attendance.

"Really, what can schools do and attendance services do to help support
regular attendance? It's as simple as that."


rnz.co.nz

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