Families have to be found before truancy tackled, says school attendance officer

An Auckland truancy officer says intervention is often coming too late, with many kids falling through the gaps or their families going missing in the system.

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

This amounted to one in 10 students missing more than 30 percent of class time that term, double the figure 10 years ago, the report said.

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

The latest ERO figures were providing some clarity on the scale of the issue, she said, but there were still problems with the system.

Referrals to attendance services depended on schools entering absenteeism, and resolving a case "takes time", she said.

"There's a lot of layers that have to be organised. It's a little bit like an onion - they have to peel each layer away at that time."

Read more:

• What counts as truancy, and why is it a problem?

In reality, attendance services often struggled to find and make contact with families.

There were limited resources for searching for them, and after that they needed to form a relationship, she said.

"The only way we're going to resolve this is to connect with whānau and families, and through that connection to find what the concerns are... and what is needed to support this young person to return to school, and be in school, and have stabilised attendance."

Attendance services were able to access Ministry of Education data to cross-check whether students had moved and enrolled at schools elsewhere, but this was not always accurate, she said.

"Addresses can often be out of date. We might get a case referred to us with an Auckland address but they may actually live down in Christchurch, and the last time they lived in Auckland was several years ago."

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

More work around attendance and student engagement had to happen in schools, although attendance officers had been in place since the beginning of 2023, she said.

"That will take time, but that was a good strategy that will build up what's needed within a school to manage attendance."

Attendance services needed to be called in much sooner - as early as Year 1, she said.

"Often we're called in too late, when the patterns are entrenched.

"I don't call it truancy, I don't call it unjustified absence, I call it non-engagement. They're just not engaged in education. And that takes a lot of work ... and there's often not options available to the young person if they're at an age where they're non-engaged."

Government focus wrong - Labour, teachers

The government's approach has drawn criticism from the Opposition and Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins, who said the government was focused on kids who were only "moderately absent".

"These are kids that might have been away 11, 12, 13 days in a term, which means they're not hitting 90 percent attendance target, but they're not chronically absent.

"It's the chronically absent kids - which is actually a much smaller group of kids ... [that] are the ones we should be focusing our attention on."

However, Whangārei primary school principal Pat Newman - speaking for the teachers' union - claimed successive governments had failed to address the underlying causes of chronic truancy.

The data was very clear, he said.

"The main reason for chronic absenteeism is socio-economic. It's what we've been telling successive government after government.

"If young parents are trying to make ends meet and may not have the petrol to get kids to school or may not have enough sets of clothing ... then you will have more absenteeism."

Barriers to getting children in the classroom would disproportionately affect younger - primary school - students who were naturally more reliant on their parents, Newman said.

He said his school was using its own money to address this issue head-on.

"We are running two vans ourselves at our own cost.

"We're very, very lucky that the one of the local Caltex stations is providing us with all the petrol, but we're paying for the driver and the van - nothing from the Ministry or Mr Seymour - and we are everyday bringing in 25 kids on that, who would not be in school otherwise."

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

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