Schools take issue with new truancy crackdown

Principals, teachers, and unions are taking issue with a new truancy crackdown, announced by Associate Education Minister David Seymour on Thursday.

Schools will no longer be able to hold teacher-only days during term time and parents of students absent for 15 days could be prosecuted.

Principals Federation president Leanne Otene said taking parents to court was a bad idea.

"Every single principal and teacher across the country wants kids at school," she said.

"However, it is not the job of school principals to start looking at punitive measures and dishing those out to parents because their children aren't at school."

Post Primary Teachers' Association president Chris Abercrombie said the power to prosecute parents had been in the ministry's hands for some time, but was not used often.

"Schools and the ministry have always been reluctant to use this. It doesn't happen very often because students who have got chronic absenteeism... There's lots of other issues going on in that family and fining them isn't necessarily going to help the situation at all," he said.

New Zealand Education Institute Te Riu Roa president Mark Potter agreed.

"It's very unlikely that taking a parent to court and charging them a fine is going to help. It's kind of implying that people are just doing it just because they don't want to, but there are deeper reasons that attendance is an issue," he said.

Abercrombie and Potter both took issue with Seymour's crackdown on teacher only days.

"Teacher-only days don't affect attendance at all because schools have to be open for so many days a year," Abercrombie said.

"If a school is closed for instruction for a teacher-only day, that day has to be made up at some point. No learning time is being lost at all."

Potter was puzzled by the announcement, noting that Education Minister Erica Stanford had previously encouraged schools to take teachers-only days for professional development in anticipation of changes to the maths and literacy curriculum.

"The ministers seem to be contradicting each other at this moment because Minister Stanford has been talking about having teacher-only days to support the rollout of this new math curriculum that's the focus for next year," he said.

"It doesn't seem that Minister Seymour has cross-checked that with his minister."

The principal of Hora Hora Primary School in Whangārei, Pat Newman, has been an educator for more than 50 years.

He told Checkpoint Seymour was "politician making out that he knows how to fix a problem and making it sound as if it's such a simple way of doing it".

"Does he think that we have been sitting on our backsides doing nothing?

"Of course we are contacting parents.

"[And] we can't get Oranga Tamariki to do what they need to do now.

Newman called for transport to be provided to help get more children to school. He said one reason for truancy were children who lived too far away or it was too unsafe to walk, or their parents did not have a car.

"We're already providing at our cost two vans a day, picking up 25 to 30 kids. I could fill another two to three vans," he said.

"So if you actually wanted to do something, give me a couple of vans Mr Seymour and pay for them, because we're paying for our ones at our cost, and stop criticising the fact that we are supposedly doing nothing, and listen to actually what we're trying to tell you instead of thinking you know it all, because you don't know it all."

Truancy is tied up with socioeconomics, Newman added. And the school lunch scheme was "a huge help".

"We will do our absolute utmost to get every child into school that we can and we are doing that. He needs to look at where we need the resources to help us do it."