Truancy: David Seymour says parents could face prosecution for kids skipping school; teacher-only days to end

Associate Education Minister David Seymour says there will be no more teacher-only days during term time and schools will need to implement a truancy plan to tackle what the Act leader calls the country’s “truancy crisis”.

It comes as the Ministry of Education releases new attendance data showing a slight increase in the number of students attending classes regularly from 47.1% in Term 2, 2023 to 53.2% in Term 2, 2024.

Also this morning, Education Minister Erica Stanford announced $30 million in funding would be stripped from a programme helping teachers learn te reo Māori and allocated to the country’s maths curriculum.

Today, Seymour announced a new policy – the Stepped Attendance Response scheme or Star – which would be mandatory for all schools from the beginning of the 2026 school year.

He said it would place obligations on the school and parents to ensure their children were attending classes regularly.

Seymour provided examples of how the scheme could work, such as:

• Five days absent: The school gets in touch with the parents/guardians to determine the reasons for absence and to set expectations.
• 10 days absent: The school leadership meets with the parents/guardian and the student to identify barriers to attendance and develop plans to address this.
• 15 days absent: Escalating the response to the ministry and steps to initiate prosecution of parents could be considered as a valid intervention.

Schools would develop their truancy plans with the Ministry of Education, attendance services and government and non-government agencies.

“Schools will have to play their part in setting a good example as well. This means not taking teacher-only days during term time.”

Seymour said it had always been the policy that a school required permission from the Ministry of Education for a teacher-only day, he was only “enforcing it”.

He also said he reserved the right to look at an infringement scheme in the future if this approach did not work.

Seymour had also directed the Ministry of Education to take a more active role in the prosecution process.

“I have asked the ministry to collect data on when a school is open or closed for instruction for the full day, and for each year group, during term time,” he said.

“Any student who reaches a clearly defined threshold of days absent will trigger an appropriate and proportionate response from their school and the ministry.

“If we get to a case where a student misses more than 15 days of term... that’s what we call chronic absence.”

That would then trigger the Government and Ministry of Education to consider fines or wrap-around support services.

“I’ve directed the Ministry of Education, with the active co-operation of the Ministry for Social Development, Oranga Tamariki, police, Kāinga Ora and Te Puni Kokiri to develop robust information-sharing agreements so that staff can share appropriate information once a student has been identified as needing support.”

Seymour said the problem of parents who just did not want to co-operate was quite widespread.

He had received a report that an attendance officer had been asked by parents to come into their home and confiscate their child’s Playstation or X-Box as a consequence for that child missing school.

He said in “most of Europe, fining was a normal thing to do”.

Seymour acknowledged there were some students who could not attend school and a prosecution would not work in those cases. There were others who were flouting the system and that’s where prosecution could work, he said.

Seymour said New Zealand school attendance rates were low by international standards. The Government’s student attendance target is 80% of students attending classes regularly by 2030.

Regular school attendance is defined as students being present for more than 90% of the term.

Meanwhile, Stanford also announced today $30m would be stripped from a programme funding teachers to learn te reo Māori and be put into increasing mathematics resources instead.

Stanford said the programme, Te Ahu o te Reo, “isn’t accredited” and was more than double the cost of “similar courses” with a price tag of $100m.

Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.