Government’s $140m school attendance initiative overlooks New Zealand’s missing children crisis – Richard Prebble

The Government should look to the community to solve the problem of children falling out of the education system, Richard Prebble writes. Photo / Michael Craig

• More than 13,000 children are completely disengaged from education and are not enrolled in any school.
• The Government’s $140 million initiative targets truancy but doesn’t address these “off the grid” children.
• Most of this funding – $123m – will go towards establishing a new attendance service

There are more than 13,000 children in New Zealand who are missing, not truant or absent, but completely disengaged from education.

They are not among the 400,000-plus pupils who are missing school today.

They are not the 80,000 students officially classified as chronically absent. Nor are they part of the 35% of the pupils enrolled at the Correspondence School who have submitted no work for a month.

These 13,000 children are not enrolled at any school at all. That’s the equivalent population to a medium-sized Auckland suburb. No one is looking for them.

The Government’s recently announced $140 million initiative is targeted at reducing truancy among enrolled students. As an aside, as long as the Government continues to pay schools on enrolment numbers rather than the numbers taught, there is no incentive to reduce absenteeism.

The 13,000 children are off the grid.

I know one of them. He was expelled from school. His caregivers are meth users. No one is looking out for him.

This is not just a personal tragedy. It’s a social and economic disaster. These children are far more likely to spend their lives dependent on benefits, caught in cycles of crime, addiction and incarceration.

With the meth epidemic raging, we can predict there will be more, not fewer, missing children.

No society can survive if it fails to educate the next generation.

The reality is that our schools don’t want them.

No party in Parliament denies the problem. All have their preferred culprit – parents, poverty, colonialism. But I’ve yet to hear a single MP offer a real solution.

Here is my suggestion.

We have people in the community capable of finding and educating these children.

In the 1980s, when unemployment surged after Rogernomics, Cabinet asked me to chair a committee to find a solution. We started with research.

The long-term unemployed had one factor in common: they had left school with no qualifications.

We created the Access scheme – a six-month programme to teach unemployed people job-ready skills. The Education Department demanded control.

I told them: “You’ve had the unemployed as pupils for 10 years and failed to teach them a single marketable skill. Why would you succeed now?”

We put the Department of Labour in charge. Entry required being unemployed with low or no qualifications. Success was measured by one thing: did the trainee get a job?

We called for proposals. The response was overwhelming from organisations such YMCA branches, marae and individuals. Many courses placed 100% of their trainees in jobs.

One welding instructor taught the illiterate to weld. One of those he trained sent me his payslip. He was earning more than an MP.

If a course didn’t lead to employment, it was shut down.

Access failed when the education bureaucracy convinced a future Government to redefine success as simply enrolling in another course. The unemployed went from one useless course to another.

Schools are not the only way to learn.

My grandson attends a kura (a school, typically where lessons are conducted in te reo Māori). We want him to learn English too. We have hired a neighbour who successfully home-schooled her own children. She now tutors him in English and maths. She’s brilliant.

There are many in the community like her who can do the same for the missing 13,000.

We spend around $12,000 per pupil a year, not counting property. The Government should offer similar funding to those who could relocate and educate these children.

The course should be judged on progress in numeracy and literacy, in English or Māori. There are standardised assessments to determine a student’s level. Independent agencies could be contracted to test every pupil at enrolment and again every six months.

Providers whose students fail to make national-average progress should not have their contract renewed.

There must be safeguards. As high-profile cases have established, education attracts those who would exploit the young. We must protect against paedophiles and extremists.

Every programme should require a police check and at least two community-appointed guardians of good character charged with monitoring.

Education doesn’t require a classroom. These children could be taught in homes, marae, garages or parks.

Offer a bonus for every child brought up to their age level and successfully enrolled in school and attending regularly.

In time, the programme could be extended to include the thousands of pupils nominally enrolled at the Correspondence School but doing no learning.

Alwyn Poole, the educationalist, has been sounding the alarm about disengaged children. His suggestion is a parenting course.

As many parents are clueless, not even knowing to never frighten a baby, it’s a good idea. But parenting courses won’t stop meth turning some parents into monsters.

If we don’t act, the next time these missing children are found, it could be during a home invasion.