KEY INSIGHTS

• On average, well over 100,000 primary and secondary children did not go to school each school day in 2022
  • Lowest absenteeism = 63,552 on February 9
  • Highest absenteeism = 256,272 on March 11
  • Average absenteeism over 2022 school year = 131,379
  • Average absenteeism over term 4 (Covid-19 green light) = 108,334
• Attendance rate average in 2022 = 80.5%
• Absenteeism rate average in 2022 = 19.5%
• Attendance reporting is currently voluntary, so the numbers above represent ~83% of all student enrollments (675,675/815,151). This increases the 2022 average absenteeism from 131,379 to 158,499 (assuming the non-reporting schools had similar attendance rates).
• Stuff also wrote an article in July 2022 saying “There are now more than 8,600 children aged 5 to 16 who are not receiving any education.” 815,151 enrolled + 8,600 not enrolled = 823,751 children who should be in school. If we use this number, the average absenteeism in 2022 is 160,171 – far more than the conservative >100,000 figure used in our headline.

…

KEY QUESTIONS

1. Should it be mandatory for all primary and secondary schools to report attendance?
2. Should we remove anonymity so that we can see how each school is going?
3. How do we solve this increasing absenteeism from school?
4. Education rarely features in the top 10 issues facing our nation. Should it be higher, lower, or is it in the right place?

…

Have your say

• LinkedIn

…

Other notes:

• The most commonly used attendance metric used currently by politicians, media, and the Ministry of Education is the 90% rule whereby it measures what % of children currently attend 90% of school days (9 days each fortnight). Term 2 2022 data has been delayed, but we are told that this will be out in coming weeks.
• The graph uses all available 2022 data published.
• The data includes primary and secondary schools.
• Not all schools submit attendance reports each week as it is currently optional to do so. Those who don’t might have higher, lower, or similar attendance rates.
• The data is aggregated across each demographic variable. For a demographic breakdown from early in June 2022, see https://thefacts.nz/economy/20-of-decile-1-2-northland-pasifika-and-maori-children-are-not-going-to-school-today/.
• Attendance reports are anonymous, so we can’t see which schools are performing best and worst.
• We are looking into historical data for previous years. It appears that the average absenteeism was 9% from 2011-2016, 10% from 2017-2018, 12% in 2020, 11% in 2021, and 19.5% in 2022.
• From the Ministry of Education:
  • A student is counted as present on-site if they are on-site at any time during a day.
  • Similarly, a student is counted as off-site (learning at home) if they are recorded as learning at home at any time during a day.
  • If a student attends school for part of the day and learns from home the rest of the day, that student is counted in each category: once for attending on-site and once for learning at home. [Note from theFacts: this will inflate attendance levels slightly]
  • Students are not included as learning at home if:
    • they are unwell
    • they are absent due to parent concerns about the risk of contracting COVID-19, or
    • the absence is unexplained
• Additional notes from the Ministry of Education can be found in the data source pages below.
• All numbers are provisional and subject to revision.

Thank you to the Factors who helped pull this together.

…

SOURCE:

Attendance = https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/attendance-under-covid-19 and then right-hand side > Schools 2022 XLS

Total school enrollments = https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/school-rolls

Data published by The Ministry of Education
(c) Crown Copyright
Licensed for use under the creative commons attribution licence (BY) 4.0

…

Did we make a mistake, or have you got smarter data?  Let us know.