A new data portal showing daily school attendance figures has been launched as part of Government efforts to address the country’s truancy rates. 

Associate Education Minister David Seymour launched the portal today, which shows school attendance rates at a regional level. Before today, attendance rates were reported for each term and released publicly by the Ministry of Education months later. 

The new portal is accessible to the public and will be updated once a week to show a national average of how many students are at school on any given day. 

Seymour said reporting by schools is currently voluntarily but would become mandatory from Term 1, 2025. 

He said 88.7 per cent of schools were voluntarily submitting their data to the Ministry of Education via student management systems. Only six schools in New Zealand did not have student management systems capable of pushing the data to the ministry, he said. 

“The reason that we’re starting off voluntary is that we’ll require law changes to be made and Cabinet has agreed to that later this year we will amend the Education and Training Act so that the Education Secretary can direct schools to report their data daily.” 

Seymour said the country was facing a nationwide attendance crisis that required more accurate and timely information to solve. 

“Once we have more data, we’re going to be in a position to better understand which students are not attending, perhaps why, are there any patterns, and which ideas and initiatives that the government undertakes will ensure that more students are attending school.” 

Figures released last month for Term 4 2023 show just over half of students (53.6 per cent) attended school regularly. Māori and Pacific students were worse affected with regular attendance rates of 39.8 per cent and 36.8 in Term 4, respectively. Regular school attendance is defined as attending more than 90 per cent in a term. 

The new attendance data is part of Seymour’s recently released attendance action plan. The plan also included new health guidance to help schools and parents decided whether a child is well enough attend classes and a communication campaign to increase awareness around the value of attending school. 

“The Government has set a target of ensuring 80 per cent of students are present for more than 90 per cent of the term by 2030. To achieve this, I’m saying to schools that they need to aspire to reach an average daily attendance rate above 94 per cent. 

“Ultimately, it’s up to parents to decide what’s appropriate for their child, but I ask parents to consider whether days off for certain reasons are in the best interest of your child. For example, if we look at the data from last term, attendance often reduces on a Friday.” 

This article was originally posted on the NZ Herald here.