Kate Hawkesby: Can truancy be solved by student-led solutions?

 

I saw a story yesterday that caught my eye because it was positive and seemed to be offering up a solution by way of cleaning up truancy rates. It’s a campaign being run in Northland, and according to the story I saw, it’s having great success at stopping kids from wagging school.

"Let's Get to School Tai Tokerau" is running in 150 schools across the region and at its heart are messages from children explaining why the classroom is a good place to be,” the story said. 

So it’s student-driven which makes sense, and it’s putting fun back into learning, and viewing school as something you don’t want to miss, rather than a chore or a punishment. 

The story said kids came up with slogans of stuff they like doing, like, playing with their friends, learning about new things, and on top of this the schools run fun competitions like MasterChef for example.

There’s also an incentive scheme like earning points for days attended and.. “at the end of the term depending on their attendance they may get some grocery vouchers.”

Now as ludicrous as that might sound, that we have to incentivise kids with grocery vouchers these days to attend school, if it works, who are we to criticise?

Surely by now, with truancy levels where they’re at, whatever works, works.

And this one maybe works because it’s got kids at the heart of it, coming up with the solutions themselves. It was the students apparently who came up with the slogan for the campaign of, ‘'let's get back to school Te Tai Tokerau.’ 

And it’s working.

One school quoted said they’ve seen ‘for the first time this year, 100 percent attendance in some of the classrooms - and that just happened overnight as a result of the children talking about all the positive things that are happening at school.’ How cool is that.

Using carrots not sticks, encouraging kids rather than looking to penalise them. Now this approach doesn’t always work, but in this case it is working– and if tangible results like that keep coming in, then it’s a great example of a community solving its own problems. 

Sadly it’s not always the case though, and that’s why measures to combat truancy need to keep evolving and seeping into every level of the school community. The teachers, the principals, the parents, the students.

And I love the idea of flipping the approach on its head and trying something new. Especially when it’s student led. I think therein lies many of the problems with our education system actually these days, it’s old school stuff that’s always been done the same way and doesn’t evolve or modernise as kids needs change. 

Too often students are told, ‘this is just how it’s always been done’, instead of asking them how it could be done better. So big ups to Northland schools and communities having success with this approach.

I hope other schools and communities are paying attention and taking note, and I hope more student driven solutions find their way into schools eventually too.

Sometimes the best people to fix the problems are actually those affected most by them. 

Kate Hawkesby is a political broadcaster on Newstalk ZB - her articles can be seen HERE.