Helping to Better Understand Poor Attendance and Engagement
The Education and Workforce Select Committee are conducting an inquiry into school attendance.
We conducted a survey of parents and teachers to help us make a submission to the Committee. You can access our submission to the Select Committee here and the full report accompanying our submission here.
According to the Committee’s terms of reference: “school attendance is a critical driver of educational outcomes. Students learn best when they are able to attend school regularly and benefit from the expertise of teachers and other professionals. Attendance is also an important measure of student engagement, although there are important aspects of student engagement that attendance figures do not capture. Attendance has been dropping since 2015. This decline has shown up across all regions, all ethnicities, all deciles, and all year levels. There are also large inequities in school attendance: students in lower decile schools are much less likely to attend school regularly. The rates of stand-downs, suspensions, exclusions, and expulsions, at a school level and at a system level, also help provide indications of where engagement in productive learning may be absent and behavioural issues may be present.”
We decided to collect feedback from parents and teachers about their experiences with attendance of their students. In particular we were interested to see if there was a link between poor literacy outcomes and poor attendance and engagement.
While not a robust scientific study, the responses from parents in particular and from some schools backed up that hypothesis. We had 24 responses from schools and 60 responses from parents.
Summary of responses from schools
Schools saw the main factors influencing attendance as:
issues at home,
parents not doing enough to get them to school,
poor literacy, not being able to keep up,
anxiety, fear experienced by student,
trauma experienced by child,
problems with transport to school,
lack of support for neurodiverse learners.
There is some evidence for a link between poor literacy achievement at a school wide level and poor overall attendance. Schools with higher levels of literacy achievement tend to have higher rates of attendance. And of schools using a structured literacy approach, all reported high (and improved) rates of attendance after switching to this approach.
Schools had a range of recommendations on how to improve attendance and engagement including using a structured literacy approach across the school to ensure early success with literacy.
Summary of responses from parents
The majority of parents have children with one or more neurodiversities (e.g. dyslexia, autism, ADHD etc).
Many of these children (close to half) have had issues with regular attendance and engagement at school.
In some cases children have ended up being withdrawn from school and homeschooled.
Many commented on the direct link between their child’s poor literacy achievement and the lack of an evidence-based approach to teaching literacy (and maths) at their school. And how this poor literacy then impacted on their child’s self-esteem and levels of anxiety, ultimately leading to them not wanting to attend school or engage when at school. In extreme cases, children have become suicidal.
Parents identified the lack of support and understanding of neurodiversity as a major problem that needs addressing through training, funding and adoption of evidence-based pedagogies.
There were a number of stories of parents having to quit their jobs to support their children’s learning at home, or of parents spending thousands of dollars on private tutoring, counselling, therapy etc and countless hours researching how to help their child. Many talked about the stress of the situation for themselves and the wider family.
Summary of feedback for improvements
Ministry of Education to mandate Structured Literacy based on the Science of Reading in every NZ school year 0-13 for all children. There are so many kids who have been left behind with their literacy. This is having an impact not only academically but also on their self esteem and belief in themselves as learners. It is impacting on their desire to attend school. Evidence-based approaches need to be mandated.
More understanding of, and support and funding for, students with learning differences. The impact of learning differences of children's mental health, school attendance and school engagement is vastly underestimated. Most teachers have little to no understanding of learning differences and therefore little empathy for the experience of a child with a learning difference. Any behaviours around this get treated as if the child is choosing to be naughty (and the child soon internalises this, especially once they've been stood down a few times for their 'bad behaviour') rather than as a symptom of a very stressed out neurological system due to not being able to keep up at school. Neurodiversity needs to be mandated for teacher training and for current teachers to have to go through for a professional development module.
Greater empathy and support for parents. The solution lies in schools working with families to identify and address the unmet needs of the child, and not in blaming the child or their parents.
More flexibility or consideration of what constitutes ‘education’. If kids' mental health is impacted by attending school, and parents are able to support them at home a couple of days a week, don't penalise them for doing so. In fact if Y9-13 kids would benefit from studying at home even with parents at work, consider that too - we hear a lot about self-directed learning, why does it have to be at school if they work more effectively in more comfortable surroundings? Dual enrolment - high school and homeschool - or an ability to enrol at Te Kura. Greater financial support for homeschooling parents.