Truancy figures are proving as elusive as the students themselves.
The last report produced on truancy was issued three years ago. It was based on surveys of schools in 1996 and 1998. It revealed a 5.6 per cent truancy rate, but it is thought that many truant children are not being identified.
Education Ministry operational policy manager Jim Matheson said yesterday that the report, and more recent anecdotal evidence, clearly indicated that there was a truancy problem.
"Everyone has acknowledged there is an issue with truancy. We know there are children out there who are not attending school regularly."
But there was no recent data to reveal the extent of the problem, he said.
That, according to a Hastings school principal and the Auckland Law Society, is not good enough. Both want a national database.
Camberley Primary School principal Peter Johnstone said it was horrific that every day hundreds of children were not at school, and the law society blamed the recent scourge of child prostitution on the Government's failure to provide an education for every student.
The ministry gathered attendance figures from schools each year, but these did not differentiate between justified and unjustified absenteeism, or intermittent and habitual truancy, Mr Matheson said.
Figures were also gathered from truancy offices nationwide, but they revealed only those being dealt with by attendance officers.
The ministry was working on the possibility of a third survey of schools, as part of its study this year on children at risk in schools, Mr Matheson said.
Obtaining truancy figures from Wellington schools proved just as difficult.
None of those contacted kept formal records.
Onslow College principal Dr Stuart Martin said the school kept attendance records only, and absences because of truancy were hard to single out.
But he believed truancy involved less than 0.5 per cent of students, and said deans for each of the years kept a close eye on the problem.
Dr Martin said he was ambivalent about a national database.
"Cyfs [Child, Youth and Family Services] has a database, but kids still get killed."
Hutt Valley deputy principal Alan Sinclair said informal figures revealed that the number of detentions handed out for truancy had fallen from 601 in 1998 to 301 the following year. For the year to date, 85 detentions had been handed out.
"But those figures don't include hardcore truants; we don't continue to give them detention." Habitually truant students are referred to the National Truancy Service.
- NZPA
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