Allocating different school holiday dates to different regions is worth considering – but could create problems, says the associate education minister.
An Education Review Office report on truancy – published today – said the change could reduce the incentive for families to take children out of school early to buy cheaper airfares.
The report said term-time holidays were the main attendance challenge facing most schools.
Associate Education Minister David Seymour said regional term dates had been discussed.
“We’ve had some discussion about that. It’s quite common for example in Germany. But the thing about Germany is they’re a federal country with many different states. New Zealand doesn’t have that,” he said.
“Could you have different educational regions? Potentially, we could look into that. But as soon as you make a change like that, you can guarantee it will have other consequences that you may not want. So look, we’re open to it, but I would just say where it’s worked overseas, it’s usually much larger countries with many different states.”
Asked what the Government could do to help schools tackle the problem, Seymour told RNZ it had “put fining back on the table”.
“There are some people who are not a ‘can’t’, they’re a ‘won’t’. In fact, they’ve got so much resource that they’re going to another country instead of being at school. And in that case, we think it’s it’s critical that we say, ‘well, just a second, there is a responsibility to the student and that responsibility is for their entire future, you can’t deny them that by taking them out of school’,” he said.
Seymour poured cold water on another of the report’s suggestions – that schools put more resources into catch-up classes for students who went overseas.
“I think that’s a possibility for schools to take on, but to be honest that means that we’re effectively going to spend more taxpayer money or take away learning resource from children who are at school in order to to help children who weren’t at school,” he said.
“If you can get all of the children in a class at the time they are meant to be there, that’s so much more efficient for everyone involved.”
Seymour said attendance was improving because parent and student attitudes had improved, and the Government could take some credit for that.
He said the recent re-contracting of attendance service providers would help improve attendance further.
“We’ve got rid of a lot of low performers that ERO identified and we’ve got a clean slate and we’ve got a higher standard right across the board. That’s got to be good for the extra taxpayer money we’re putting in to get more children not only to school, but to keep attending once we get them there,” he said.
The report was based on surveys of 890 school leaders, 1967 teachers, 5082 students, and 6683 parents and whānau, as well as interviews and focus groups with 300 participants and visits to 16 schools in term 2 this year.
It found 73% of students thought daily attendance was important, up from 67% in 2022, and 28% never wanted to miss school, up from 15%.
The report said attitudes improved most among students from low-income areas.
It said the percentage of parents comfortable with their child taking a week or more off school dropped from 41% to 31%, but the number comfortable with children missing a couple of days rose from 50% to 59%.
The report said schools that were effective in raising attendance ensured students felt connected to school, set clear and high expectations for attendance, helped those who were struggling, and provided rewards and recognition for good attendance.
Official figures showed regular attendance, defined as attending more than 90% of classes, reached 58% in term 2, up from an all-time low of 40% in 2022 and similar to 2019’s figure.
From 2011-2018 term 2 regular attendance ranged from 64-69%.
The Government’s target was for 80% of school pupils attending regularly by 2030.
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