Source: Radio New Zealand
Children in a classroom learning. UnSplash/ Taylor Flowe
Early signs suggest the government’s overhaul of local truancy services is working – at least in some areas.
Most principals contacted by RNZ said it was too early to judge whether their local attendance service provider was doing a better job, but two said theirs were already returning more chronic truants to class.
Last year, the ministry signed 83 new contracts aimed at making providers more accountable and effective at tracking down the most serious truants.
In Whangarei, Hora Hora School principal Pat Newman said the service brought 10-15 children to his school this year who would otherwise be at home.
He said some had never been to school at all.
“What we’re finding is that we’re getting children who have not been attending school or [attending] poorly,” he said. “We’ve got some children who have not been at school, at [age] seven or so attending.”
He said the service approached the problem in the right way.
“What they’re trying to do is to look at what’s stopping a kid coming to school and then looking at where they can get help to take away the problem,” he said.
Other, more punitive options were considered only if the initial help didn’t work.
“I think it’s a damn good model,” Newman said. “It will continue or fail, depending on the resourcing put behind it.”
At Auckland’s Jean Batten Primary School, principal Nardi Leonard said her local attendance service was working better too.
“What we have noticed by the new service is they are more readily available to us,” she said.
“If you reflect back on the old system, a lot of the attendance officers were constantly soaked up into secondary schools and all the high schools, and at the primary level for us, we felt that the resource just didn’t get down to us,” she said.
“The new system, our person actually has less schools and they are primary schools, so we do feel there’s that support directly.”
She said her school had all but given up on the previous attendance service, but under the new system, it had already referred children and had positive results.
“In the short time of five weeks, we’ve made three referrals and we’ve been able to get two back,” she said. “One, we don’t know where that person’s gone, so that’s obviously a hard one, but we have got two children back in school.
“The next challenge is the sustainability of keeping them in school, but we celebrate the small steps and just work towards increasing it day-by-day.”
Leonard said, previously, the school got no response from the attendance service and had pretty much given up using it.
She said the school emphasised the importance of daily attendance and it was good to have the back-up provided by the attendance service.
Other principals told RNZ their local provider was still getting started and they were yet to see how they performed.
Berkley Normal Middle School in Hamilton was part of a group of schools that lost its attendance service contract in last year’s re-organisation.
Principal Nathan Leith said it was too early to tell if the new organisation was doing a better job, but he reckoned schools definitely were.
Leith said many had not realised how bad their attendance was, until they looked carefully at their data.
They now had to put a five-step attendance plan on their websites and have clear plans for what to do after a certain number of days’ absence.
“Those are the things that are perhaps making a bigger difference,” he said.
Leith said schools were dealing with the bulk of poor attenders and occasional truants, while the attendance services would tackle the toughest cases.
He said the service should have funding to tackle social issues, such as lack of money for food or school uniforms, that contributed to truancy and he hoped some of that funding would make it to schools.
Education Ministry figures showed daily attendance averaged a little more than 89 percent so far this year, about one percentage point more than at the same time last year.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
