All my friends sometimes skip school. For my school ‘think tank’ project, I decided to explore why they do so, and to propose some ideas for reducing the behaviour.
  
My friends are not alone. In 2023, only 46% of students nationally regularly attended school. That means that more than half missed at least one day per fortnight without a good reason. Earlier this month, the Education Review Office reported that 10% of New Zealand’s students are chronically absent. 

The Ministry of Education’s Attendance Service has grown rapidly in recent years. Yet its progress in reducing truancy has been minimal. Rather than simply increasing the number of Attendance Officers, a smarter approach is needed. 

The task of the Attendance Service is to ensure that students attend school. To be more effective, it must work more closely with teachers and principals to make sure that attendance at every school is maintained at a high level. 

Students skip school for many reasons, including a lack of motivation and willingness to attend school, and other significant reasons, such as bullying, and family troubles. Furthermore, some caregivers are supporting these decisions by their children, making the situation worse. 

To make the Attendance Service more effective, a restructure is necessary. Schools should be able to appoint their own Truancy Officers to take responsibility for attendance. If Truancy Officers were located in particular schools, they could form relationships with truant students and their families to support them better. 

To effectively reduce truancy, the different reasons students skip school must be taken into account. Localising Truancy Officers would enable them to tailor their work to support attendance by addressing the specific reasons that particular students are truant.  

Such a restructure would not be costly. In fact, if it made each Truancy Officer more effective, it might even save money.  

The effectiveness of the approach is likely to vary, with community and school factors influencing its effectiveness. It may take longer to see results in some schools than others.  

Localising Truancy Officers would help address New Zealand’s school attendance problem, but it probably won’t entirely solve the truancy problem. Over time, further solutions should be developed to suit the needs of specific communities and families.  

Localised responses to truancy are likely to be more effective than a top-down approach from the central government. But, if the attendance service were structured better, we could achieve a reduction in truancy relatively quickly.