Recent reports by Education Review Office (ERO) on school attendance are alarming, and not just because of the statistics and trends they measure. ERO reports that school attendance in New Zealand is continuing to drop; the figures show a disconcerting discrepancy – not in our favour – in comparison with the countries against which we like to measure ourselves, such as Australia, the UK and the USA. To sum up the national attendance decline: in 2011, 69% of all school enrollees attended for 90%+ of the time school was open in Term 2, whereas in 2022, the comparable percentage was 39%.

ERO recently published a series of documents about attendance. The first, Missing out (Education Review Office) was released on 10 November, 2022, and focussed on attendance statistics. A set of ‘guides’ followed, released on 21 February 2023, apparently aiming at the people ERO thinks are responsible for non-attendance, or at least, for not encouraging attendance. These documents are entitled:

Attendance - Getting back to school: Guide for primary school teachers;

Attendance - Getting back to school: A guide for parents and whānau;

Attendance - Getting back to school: A guide for secondary school teachers

(Education Review Office, 2023).

The statistics reported in these papers are alarming, especially when placed alongside the figures from other countries. 40% of children in Aotearoa New Zealand are (apparently) non-attenders causing concern: the figures from Australia, Ireland, the UK, the US and Canada suggest that comparable statistics there range between 11 and 27%. Some scepticism about the reliability of these figures may well be justified. It might also be interesting to see what the figures look like if a less idealistic rate of attendance (say 85%) were used as the benchmark.

The reason given for the concern about non-attendance is the relationship between lack of attendance at school and lack of ‘achievement’- a relationship that ERO present (unsubtly) as causal, rather than correlative. These papers, almost by definition, try to find universal reasons for non-attendance, although they have sorted the data to differentiate Māori and Pacific students and families from the total data heap. COVID-19 might be seen as the villain in the piece, but the reports make it clear that the trend to greater absences among school children in Aotearoa New Zealand started before the pandemic. It would seem, therefore, that the issues lie deeper than the interruptions to schooling caused by the pandemic, although they surely haven’t helped. In keeping with the ethos of government and the Ministry of Education for many years, these reports attempt to individualise responsibility; logically, if parents, children, and teachers can be found responsible, then the appropriate actions to ‘solve’ the problems will lie with the aggregated actions of these participants.

The initial summary (Education Review Office, 2022) sheets the blame home to parents and students who do not understand that attendance at school will make them wiser and (consequently) wealthier. This is a restatement of the neo-liberal ‘grand lie’: that success in school necessarily translates to ‘success’ (understood as wealth) in life. This is the only aim of education offered to parents and students for the last 30 years, and at least some – potentially, at both ends, those least likely to ‘succeed’ and those most likely to ‘succeed’ – may have seen through the deception. School cannot create jobs, and the best that can be claimed of the association between school attendance and ‘success’ is correlation – not causation. The covert claim to causation is used to motivate schools and parents to send their children to school regularly, to monitor homework and so on – but it is just as likely to be other social and economic factors which cause rangatahi success, or failure. Mistaken or not, the presence of family wealth, or the absence of future pay-off for education, is a cogent argument for adolescents, and is perhaps endorsed, if not instigated, by their parents.

The failure fully to examine the impact of poverty and its many manifestations is a huge weakness in the depth of this report, and its consequent usefulness. Transport difficulties are easy to identify – and for parents in focus groups, relatively innocuous targets of criticism. But more weighty factors, including: the imprisonment of parents; failure of benefits to provide adequate support (and the consequent pressure on children to work); housing disadvantages; mental health problems (including drug and alcohol use); chronic illness of parents or children; and the role of child carers, are all left untouched.

The report’s authors examine the reasons given by parents for non-attendance, and, to a superficial degree, they look at the culpability of schools. But the term ‘bullying’ is accepted as a reason for non-attendance in itself, accompanied by a suggestion that there are accepted frameworks for dealing with ‘bullying’. But bullying itself – in its many forms – describes a failure of school or family to meet the needs of the ‘bullies,’ themselves often victims of various forms of violence. Often ‘bullying’ is used to describe discomfort with jarring social norms, which in itself becomes an explanation of racialised apprehensions.

Teachers are adjured to make school more interesting, but there is no hint of the fact that the Ministry’s focus on a narrow diet of literacy and numeracy may well have contributed to making the curriculum less interesting than it used to be, when teachers were captains of their classrooms. Indeed, there is no recognition at any point that there may be structural problems, which lie beyond any possible control of teachers and/or parents.

Poverty, and the awful inadequacies of Work and Income benefits, are not addressed in these documents. Nor are the many forms of cultural/epistemological violence to which children are exposed in schools. The complexities of neurological and emotional barriers to children’s comfort with the school environment are lumped together under ‘mental health’ and a sort of official panacea of ‘specialist assistance’ that everyone knows is scarce, almost impossible to obtain, and frequently not available at all – is meant to cover this.

The advice offered to parents and teachers is prima facie good advice, but hardly addresses the deep fissures in New Zealand society or education. Predictably, political actors have seized on these reports, and angled them towards their own ideological benefits. It seems Labour sees the problem as technical, to be solved by administrative changes. For example, Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti told the Herald that she accepted the trends had worsened under Labour, but, as the former principal herself said, it could be linked back to structural changes to the monitoring system in 2013. Tinetti explained:

In 2013 - I was a principal at the time - Attendance Services changed structurally. It used to be quite close to schools, but became more centrally located, more bureaucratic, and [this] has taken away that local response. (Neilson, 2022)

Parents are a general target of political ire: Chris Hipkins, then Minister of Education, promised to reintroduce truancy officers (Malpass, 2023). National Party leader Christopher Luxon immediately pointed the finger, saying: “We need to consider absolutely anything and everything in order to get parents to face up to their responsibility” (Burns, 2022).

Universal and compulsory school education was the great experiment of the 19th century. It was given widespread support and social licence for more than 100 years. Perhaps parents, whānau and students are now trying to tell us, as educational researchers, that we need to re-think the mode of education in the 21st century.