Francesca Rudkin: The truancy issue is more nuanced than headlines suggest

It has been really good this week to hear Assistant Education Minister David Seymour talking about tackling truancy rates.

The stats are awful. The latest figures, released in December, showed only 46 percent of school pupils attended school more than 90 percent of the time in term 3 2023. In comparison, 63 percent attended in term 3 of 2019, before Covid-19. Students who attend less than 70 percent of the time - known as chronic absenteeism - was 12.6 percent in December. This is higher than in previous years, with Maori and Pacific students over-represented.

The statistics before Covid were average and clearly things have gone further askew since the pandemic, so it’s good to see this is a priority issue for the new Government. Education, after all, is as important to the future of the individual as it is to the future of the country.

Seymour has ideas for how to tackle it. There’s talk of using current legislation to prosecute and fine parents of chronically absent children. That’s one way to clarify a parent’s responsibility - but the judicial system is clogged up already, and will fines be paid?

Seymour also wants schools to report absenteeism weekly rather than each term. More regular data would be useful, but surely monthly is enough? More importantly than frequency is quality of information about why a child is absent.

To fix this problem you need to know the specifics. You need to understand the community and its challenges, and how to reach the parents and children. This is where truancy services come in, so the proposed closer monitoring of what they’re doing is also a step in the right direction.

But truancy is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. It isn’t just about a bunch of neglectful parents who can’t be arsed getting their kids to school.

There are also parents who don’t feel they can send their children to school until they’ve managed to buy the uniforms and stationary. One Rotorua intermediate school trialed using their operational funding to provide free uniforms and stationery. The improvement in attendance at the beginning of the year was so good, the school is prepared to do it again.

Then there are teenagers having to decide if they’ll get an education or help put food on the family table. This is not a decision teenagers should face, but it’s a reality. Just this week, The Child Poverty Action Group released a report stating around 15,000 teenagers are working between 20-50 hours a week to help support their families.

We’ve also seen a rise in mental health issues post-Covid. Often, children suffering from acute anxiety and depression want to go to school but simply can’t. It’s hard and takes too long for families to get into the health system to access support they need, and many students are falling through the cracks.

It’s the same for the neurodiversity. 1 in 5 youngsters in New Zealand are neurodivergent. So why aren’t we prioritizing getting children diagnosed for learning disabilities? There is no reason why those children can’t with a little extra help get a good education. Prison stats shows over 57 percent of male prisoners in New Zealand have dyslexia. Get it sorted early. Give the kid some hope, and keep them in school.

So I applaud David Seymour for getting serious about truancy – but let’s hope that he’s prepared to deal with the wide spectrum of issues facing our children and adolescents which prevent them from getting a decent education. It won’t be solved with just a big stick.

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.