We’re failing our children by not preparing them for the realities of adult life, writes Brooke van Velden. Photo / 123RF
OPINION:
We’re failing our children by not preparing them for the realities of adult life.
In Term 2 of this year, 60 per cent of students did not attend school regularly. It gets worse by decile, with only 23 per cent of Decile 1 students attending regularly. In Northland, only 28 per cent of all students attend regularly.
These are horrifying statistics. Kids are leaving school without the vital literacy and numeracy skills needed to sit a driver’s licence test, read an employment agreement, or budget for household expenses.
Worse, many teenagers are finishing their school years without forming essential life skills like building working relationships in classrooms outside of friendship groups and knowing and keeping to a schedule.
By not enforcing attendance, it’s saying to kids that it’s okay to not show up. If they’re skipping the “boring subjects” they’re not learning that life isn’t all fun and games and TikTok reels. With the exciting also comes the mundane. Even people with the coolest-sounding jobs still need to show up to staff meetings or spend a few hours a week clearing and responding to emails.
Today’s students are the future’s builders, truck drivers, hairdressers and sales assistants. What will the casual acceptance of absenteeism mean for the future of our country? What will it mean for people who pay wages and rely on staff turning up each day to keep their businesses running?
If a truck driver decides not to show up for work, it’s a logistical nightmare for suppliers and customers on both ends. If a plumber, sparky or painter is absent on a new build, it’s not only annoying for the team, it can push out the whole construction sequence by days, if not weeks.
I spoke to a cafe owner recently who said she’s one of the lucky ones who does have staff on her books, the difficulty is knowing if they’ll bother to show up in the morning. The younger employees don’t even bother to send a courtesy text to say they’re not coming in.
We must change this otherwise we’re not allowing children to reach their full potential. I want to live in an aspirational society, where people can make a difference in their own lives. But, if the adults of today have low expectations for kids even turning up to the school gate, it’s hard to expect kids who’ve known no different to do better and want better for themselves.
So what’s the Government currently doing about it? They’ve set an extremely uninspiring goal of 70 per cent attendance across New Zealand. If this is the sort of middling standards that our Government is aspiring for, no wonder we’re seeing such a decline. Act has a different perspective.
In the past we have been the driving force behind Charter Schools, which had high attendance rates and inspired children who the education system wasn’t working for. We still believe in this highly successful approach.
Another major issue is data, or lack thereof. There is no consistent method for recording unjustified absences across New Zealand schools. Some schools use electronic attendance registers, others manual attendance registers. There were 108 schools that chose to share nothing at all.
Act would require every school in New Zealand to fill out an electronic attendance register, if they fail to do so they will risk losing some of their funding. The Government will be required to publish the previous day’s data every day.
Schools need to be better resourced to deal with truancy. The Government spends $38.5 million on truancy services, with poor outcomes and accountability. Act says it should be given to schools to use for hiring their own truancy officers. The funding would be weighted to the Equity Index, so schools with more vulnerable student populations would receive more funding.
We’ve also proposed a traffic light system to set out clear expectations for the responsibilities of everyone relating to unjustified absences. This way we can scale up the seriousness of response for recidivist truancy and define whether it’s a situation that simply needs the school to give the parents a ring, or at the most serious end of the scale a problem that might involve fines and more serious consequences.
Ultimately consequences are what is needed in some situations. Currently, parents cannot be fined for student non-attendance without a court conviction, but they can be fined on the spot for speeding to school. Act would change the Education and Training Act to allow the Ministry of Education to introduce an infringement notice regime for truancy.
These policies are about raising standards in our schools and ensuring New Zealand children are being taught to the highest standard. We should be aspiring to have the top-performing education system in the world, otherwise what is occurring now is set to be a generational failure.