COVID Not to Blame for Truancy Crisis: New Zealand Opposition Leader

National Party Leader Christopher Luxon speaks to media during an unveiling event at The Backbencher Pub in Wellington, New Zealand, on Aug. 3, 2022. (Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

New Zealand National Party Leader Christopher Luxon said COVID-19 was no longer a sufficient reason to explain the country’s truancy crisis.

The comments come after the Ministry of Education released its latest attendance indicator report, which found that only 40 percent of students regularly attended school during term two (pdf). This is a fall of six percentage points from term one.

Regular attendance is defined as an attendance rate of over 90 percent, where a minimum of four hours is counted as one day present.

This decrease in attendance was seen across the board, regardless of year level, ethnic group, and socio-economic background.

Rates of chronic absence (less than 70 percent attendance) were highest among Maori and Pacific ethnic groups, and students in Year 13, the final year of high school, had the lowest percentage of regular attendance by year level.

A major reason for increases in absence were families keeping their children home for illness or medical reasons, coinciding with the winter illness season and COVID-19.

However, Luxon said figures from overseas indicate the pandemic is being used as an excuse in New Zealand.

“I looked at the term one data, you know earlier in the year, and what was obvious to me less than half of the actual decline in absence school was due to sickness,” he told media at Canterbury, reported Radio NZ.

“And it’s the same here. Other countries have had Omicron, other countries have had COVID—Ireland, Canada, Australia, the U.S., UK—and they have much higher levels of regular attendance at schools here.”

Minister Says Situation Improving, Time for Parents to Do Their Part

According to Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti, the unusually low attendance rates was partly due to families isolating during the peak of the Omicron wave.

Declining school attendance is a trend that started in 2015 and accelerated during the pandemic.

But Tinetti said she was confident the Ministry’s strategy to improve attendance that was announced in June was turning the situation around.

“Term two this year is an outlier,” she told RNZ, adding that one school principal had recently told her his school had seen 93 percent attendance over the last few weeks.

A separate report by the Education Review Office found that over four in ten parents weren’t concerned with their children missing out a month or more of class every school year.

Tinetti said it was now time for parents to “reset” their mentality.

“Yes, people have been at home and there’s been a disruption over the last three years, and totally understand how tough that’s been,” she said.

“But its time to get your children back to school.”

Luxon said the country needed to consider “absolutely anything and everything” to get parents to take up their responsibility and encourage children to go to school, including action similar to the UK where parents can be fined for their child’s absence.

However, Tinetti disagreed with the suggestion, saying it had been tried in the past and failed.

“It’s a really simplistic solution to a really complex problem ... the evidence shows it doesn’t work,” she said.