School attendance: David Seymour takes on truancy crackdown, proposes more use of fines for parents

Associate Education Minister David Seymour is eyeing up moves to crack down on truancy by prosecuting and fining more parents whose children are frequently absent from school.

Seymour has been given the responsibility for school attendance as associate education minister – an issue Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has also put a strong emphasis on during the campaign and since then, frequently repeating his urging to parents to ensure children attend school.

Seymour said Cabinet had not yet made any decisions on the issue, but he would be proposing stepping up sanctions on parents such as through more use of fines, as well as releasing school attendance data weekly, rather than only after each term.

“We will be signalling, as the PM has, that is it a duty to send your kids to school. And we will be investigating whether we should actually start using the power to fine, as they have in the UK, more frequently.”

Currently, parents can be fined if their child is repeatedly absent from school – however, it is rarely used and requires a prosecution before the fine can be imposed. The fines are up to $300 for a first successful prosecution and up to $3000 for subsequent prosecutions.

Seymour said the power to fine was already there, but was not used enough. It had only been used once in about five years.

“The law is there, the Ministry of Education has the option to take prosecutions. They haven’t.”

He said the UK had faced similar issues and used fines to “send a message that this is an obligation people have.”

Both National and Act had proposed a greater use of prosecutions and fines of parents in cases of chronic absenteeism during the election campaigns. Act had also proposed instant fines in cases where a student kept missing school without a valid reason.

Seymour said that would be up for consideration as part of the truancy effort, although it would depend on advice and Cabinet sign-off: “everything is on the table.”

While Covid-19 was a big factor in the poor results over the last few years, Seymour said school attendance levels had been steadily dropping since 2013, which pointed to a bigger issue. “It seems societal attitudes towards school attendance have gone from ‘it is essential and there is no option, you are going to school’ to ‘well, you don’t always have to go.”

The attendance figures for Term 4 of 2023 are not due until April. However, figures released in December last year showed only 46 per cent of school pupils attended school more than 90 per cent of the time in Term 3 of 2023 – down from 63 per cent in third term of 2019, before Covid-19.

Chronic absenteeism (students who attend less than 70 per cent of the time) was also still high at 12.6 per cent after sitting around 7-8 per cent in earlier years. Māori and Pacific students were worst affected.

The Ministry of Education analysis said the figures were largely due to winter illnesses and the Covid-19 isolation period, which was still in place for half of the term, although a record number of students were absent because of holidays taken during school time.

Seymour believed parents and schools had become wary since Covid-19 but that mindset needed to change. A public education campaign could be useful at setting out when it was and wasn’t safe to attend school.

“One thing Covid did is it has taught people to exercise an abundance of caution. Actually, education should be a priority as well as health. Often it will be perfectly safe to go to school and parents hesitate. You can understand that, because that’s the messaging they had for two years intensively. It may be time for some public education.”

Seymour also wanted to look into the effectiveness of the Attendance Service, which has 79 providers contracted to identify and deal with students at risk of disengaging from school, and work to get students back to school. Labour pumped up the resources into that service to try to resolve the school attendance issues after Covid-19 - former Education Minister Jan Tinetti had set a target of returning to 70 per cent regular attendance levels in 2024.

Seymour said that needed to be investigated to ensure it was working, given attendance numbers had not improved.

He was also telling officials to publish truancy data every week, rather than only after each term to ensure a focus on the problem. “You’ve got to acknowledge the problem.”

Schools are responsible for keeping attendance records, and taking “reasonable steps” to get children to attend including notifying parents when their child is away from school. They must also provide data to the ministry and Seymour has flagged concerns that not every school currently does that.