David Seymour announcing a new $140 million school attendance service to tackle truancy. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
A Hamilton principal said his local attendance service will likely use a government funding increase to help alleviate poverty.
Associate Education Minister, David Seymour, on Wednesday announced next week's Budget would raise spending on tackling truancy by about 50 percent, with more funding for frontline services, a new case management system, and better data monitoring.
Berkley Normal Middle School was in a group of Hamilton schools that had been running their own attendance service for five years.
Its principal, Nathan Leith, said that until Wednesday's announcement, the group set up under the Kāhui Ako scheme had been wondering about funding for their attendance service beyond the end of the year.
"We could always have more resourcing, so I think it's good there's been some allocated funding," he said.
Leith said if service did get more money, it was likely to be used to help struggling families overcome problems caused by poverty.
"Some of the issues that families are struggling with... we don't have the resources to be able to support them. Mainly through poverty, through student lunches, uniforms, all of those sorts of things that stop kids from coming to school," he said.
"So the resource can be really helpful, so we can support and fund some of those things that some of these families need.
"It may not be a long-term solution, but it can be a little bit of a quick fix to support with uniform or food or something along those lines to be able to get kids along to school again."
Berkley Normal Middle School. Photo: GOOGLE MAPS
Wednesday's announcement said next week's Budget package for attendance would total $140 million over four years.
Education Ministry figures showed it had already spent about $32m a year on attendance services and attendance officers to work with students who were not enrolled at school or who missed more than 30 percent of their classes and were classed as chronically absent.
The ministry today told schools it would open the contracts for attendance services for tender in the middle of the year and transfer about $9m used to pay for about 82 attendance officers directly to the attendance services.
The ministry said: "Under the new model, schools will be able to refer more chronically absent students to Attendance Service providers for additional support. Schools with the highest numbers of chronically absent students will also be eligible to apply for additional funding to provide some of this support themselves. All non-enrolled students will be referred to an Attendance Service provider."
Seymour said under the new model, there would be about 80 attendance service providers, and about 170 schools with the most serious truancy problems would get dedicated staff.
"The most important thing is that where there's greater need, there's greater resource," he said.
Seymour said the changes were in addition to a requirement that all schools have an attendance management plan from the start of next year.
He said parents of chronic truants could be fined, and that might happen later in the year, but he did not expect penalties would be widely used.
Seymour said he had spoken to many people who worked with truants and had come across "real heroes".
Among them was "Philippa from Freyberg", who collated the attendance data of incoming Year 9 students from their primary schools to help determine which students might have attendance problems.
Seymour said there were many reasons for truancy and cited the case of a family that asked a police youth aid officer to take their child's PlayStation.
"It's about case-by-case working through each barrier," he said.
"Sometimes it will be that a student has fallen behind in their school work and as a result they feel embarrassed about going back to school, so there needs to be a plan to reintegrate them and keep them there," he said.
Seymour said some parents took their children out of school to take advantage of cheaper overseas airfares, while others were taking children out of school to look after siblings because they didn't have much money.
"When you talk to people who are experts and devote their life to this business, what they will tell you is the biggest thing that's changed and the reason education attendance has declined in the last decade or more is the approach of the wider community, including parents," he said.
The Education Review Office last year reported that the attendance system was under-funded and needed an overhaul.
Reports obtained under the Official Information Act showed the problems attendance services encountered ranged from reluctant schools to a hard-to-use computer system.
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