- Associate Education Minister David Seymour says $140m will be allocated in Budget 2025 for school attendance.
- Most of the funding will go towards creating a new service.
- The remaining will be given to existing frontline attendance services.
School attendance efforts will get a $140 million boost over four years in Budget 2025, Associate Education Minister David Seymour says.
This is the latest in Seymour’s mission to increase school attendance.
He told reporters this morning those efforts have included encouraging local mayors to get on board but said, in some cases, the responses had not been satisfactory for him.
“We’ve got some responses that maybe the people in those communities need a new mayor, I don’t know.”
He also wanted to see businesses stop selling to students who were uniform during school hours.
“If it is 2pm and you know school is in session, and you know they should be at school, you should ... make a judgment call and say that’s not okay.”
He addressed fines, penalties or prosecutions for parents – saying they would play a clear role in the new approach for those who won’t participate rather than can’t, due to certain barriers, for example.
“You wouldn’t take a prosecution to court if you knew the defence was going to be we physically, financially have no other alternative ... what problem would it solve?”
Most of this funding – $123m – will go towards establishing a new attendance service, based on recommendations from a 2024 report from the Education Review Office (ERO).
Seymour discussed the funding boost at 8.30am this morning. You can watch the press conference from the below link:
For the new approach, Seymour told reporters today the country would be divided into about 80 regions and each would have a single attendance service contracted.
Seymour said some parts of the country would need more support than others.
“The data tells us areas like Northland have quite a big challenge, some parts of Auckland, East Coast – Tairāwhiti – but I wouldn’t stereotype areas.
“You take a area like Southland or Otago which tends to have some of the highest attendance, there could be areas there that still need help.”
The remaining $17m will go towards strengthening existing frontline attendance services.
“Frontline attendance services will be more accountable, better at effectively managing cases and data-driven in their responses,” Seymour said.
“To achieve this, they will soon have access to a new case management system and better data monitoring, and their contracts will be more closely monitored.”
Seymour told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking there has been “good improvement” in attendance with a 5% increase term to term compared to last year’s numbers.
“The trend is positive, but it is nowhere near good enough.”
He said the ERO report last year found “pathetic practices” and mixed ideas on the best ways to keep kids in schools.
Seymour said he spent a lot of time in meetings with principals, attendance, youth police officers and more trying to find out what actually worked to raise attendance, which he feels this new scheme includes.
He “promised results” from this money, which would largely be used to add more people on the ground.
The 2024 ERO report made four recommendations for a new attendance scheme to address chronic absences from school. They were:
- Strengthening how to prevent students becoming chronically absent. This would require social agencies to address the barriers to attendance that sit outside of the education sector.
- Having effective targeted supports in place to address chronic absence, including clearer roles and responsibilities for chronic absence for schools, attendance services, families and other agencies.
- Increasing the focus on retaining students on their return, including a deliberate plan to support returning students to reintegrate, be safe, and catch up.
- Implementing an efficient and effective model. This relates to centralised functions such as information-sharing agreements between agencies and prosecutions of parents, and localised actions such as ensuring schools have the necessary resources and support.
The Government’s new attendance model would address recommendations two to four.
“The wider attendance action plan, which includes the requirement for schools to have their own attendance management plan aligned with the Stepped Attendance Response [Star] in place by Term 1 of 2026, will address all four.”
Mayors
Seymour says he has tried to encourage local mayors to pick up the issue and help address.
“But we’ve got some responses that maybe the people in those communities need a new mayor, I don’t know.
“All I would say is we all own the attendance data. We all own the outcomes of non-attendance ... whether you are a mayor, an iwi leader, a business owner, there are things you can do.”
He said he would like to see business owners no serving students in uniform during school hours.
“You’ve got a moral obligation as part of your community not to try to make a few extra bucks selling a bottle of Primo when you know the child should be learning.”
Penalties
Seymour was asked about the role of financial penalties for parents whose children are missing school.
He said the Government had been “very clear” penalties were part of the mix but that they would only work for a small portion of people “who are a won’t rather than a can’t”.
“If you persistently don’t send your kids to school, you could be fined and I suspect there will be some of that towards the back end of this year.
“Often times, it is just barriers, and I have had examples where students have been playing Playstation all night and the Youth Aid police officer went around and confiscated it.”
Seymour said it would be a small number who were prosecuted.
“Sometimes, it will be that a child has fallen behind in their school work and as a result they feel embarrassed about going back to school so there needs to be a plan to reintegrated them and keep them there.
“There is no one particular reason. At one end of the scale, parents taking their students out of school so they can get cheaper fees so they can go to Fiji. At the other end, there are parents taking kids out of school so they can look after their siblings because they don’t have a lot of money.
Seymour said service providers would work with families, local communities and social agencies.
The level of service provided would depend on the need, ranging from advice and support to schools to intensive case management of students.
Schools with the highest numbers of chronically absent students would be able to apply for funding for an in-school service, he said.
“The schools in this bracket tend to be ones in higher equity index groups, facing the most socio-economic barriers.”
Moving to the new attendance service would begin at the end of this year and the new services would become fully operational from early 2026.
“Attending school is the first step towards achieving positive educational outcomes,” Seymour said.
“Positive educational outcomes lead to better health, higher incomes, better job stability and greater participation within communities. These are opportunities that every student deserves.”
Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.
