New Zealand’s school attendance is lower than the OECD average, especially in upper secondary ages, with rates dropping from 70% to 50% between 2015 and 2025.
We also saw further decline for Term 3 2024 – 25.
Full attendance statistics (90% of days attended)
There are three levels of solutions:
1. Societal Leadership
At present we have a genuinely chaotic education sector for a range of reasons. Protests re the removal of treaty clauses in the Education Act, strikes, 90 high schools opposing qualifications changes (60 supporting), no support from subject organizations re curriculum changes, many in the sector calling for a slow-down in curriculum changes.
The Minister – Stanford – has led by imposing – as opposed to convincing and leading her “team”. The sector sees her as someone who has listened to a small group of international idealogues, and a couple of detached NZ “academics” and chosen to barely engage with NZ educators. She could look to blames unions, rogue Principals, Maori academics – etc – but she knew the arena, or should have, before she entered it. Promising policies do not work without carrying the sector with you.
As I have written before David Seymour is exactly the wrong person to have the Ass. Minister responsibility for Attendance. He is publicly viewed to be anti-Maori/Pasifika and I would vote him the least likely to be able to encourage any child/family to get themselves to school. His handling of the school lunch situation has been appalling. There are two choices here – either – provide really high-quality school lunches (even if they cost more) as it makes children and families feel welcome and valued – or don’t provide them at all and genuinely put responsibility on parents.
The sector, as a whole, looks like they barely care. When, under the last government, there was a select committee investigation into school attendance – only 8 schools (of 2,600) submitted – and the committee chose not to seek any broad sector investigation. I.e. We have not detailed stats on why students are not attending. Nor do we know why we have up to 10,000 students not enrolled anywhere. Reasons for non-attendance are far more readily available in Australia – and we need to catch-up. We need to know this information for EVERY schools – and tailor the response.
In 2025 ERO reported – before the Term 3 decline – that things were improving and now “only” 31% of parents are comfortable with their children missing a week or more of school each term. They also noted that the government has allocated $140m over 4 years to support improvement. That is about 1.4% of VOTE Education. In 2022 ERO did produce a reasonably good report on attendance in NZ schools.
The Ministry of Education is seen by the sector to be highly ineffective and bogged down. The appointment of a long-term Deputy Secretary – involved in all of the most significant decline period – as the Secretary for Education – does nothing to assure anyone of genuine change in the Ministry towards being more effective in overseeing the education of our children.
Long-Term Solutions.
1. As a nation we need to deeply understand our crises in parenting. If your want our education system to work well then you need to understand the “glory days” of NZ being world leading (i.e. the 1970s) was not because out schools were simply fantastic – but because family and school values were closely aligned.
We have a significant portion of parents in NZ who have failed in their own education, have no affinity for schools, were often traumatized there, and have no heritage of good parenting.
Until we make great parenting the key attribute of NZ society – many schools are on a hiding to nothing. As I have advocated previously – we need an information based Crown Entity for Parenting with the key aim of improving the development of children from conception to 5yo.
2. Schools and teachers need to be a great deal better. There is a great deal of research on the competence of NZ teachers in certain areas (e.g. Maths) that is not encouraging. Children will not come to school and engage every day – unless they see the worth of doing so. This can include having great extra-curricula provision but making participation in it dependent on attendance and classroom behaviour/performance.
3. Schools need to make ALL parents very welcome in the school at all times. There are some schools who won’t let parents passed reception. Having high-quality interactions with parents and a genuine Community Liaison Manager in schools I have operated has made the family feel a part of the school community.
4. There needs to be full recognition that a significant number of students in NZ have logistical changes to get to school. Leavers’ data shows that students from poor homes are a long way behind those from wealthy homes. It also shows rural children are behind also. I lived in the Bay of Islands for six years. Some students need to wake at 5.30 each day – take two buses and a ferry to get to school – and the same to get home. They wake up in the dark and return in the dark. We need to develop hybrid schools.
5. A few years back I visited a wonderful New York organisation called Harlem Children’s Zone. They are what this article calls a “Full Service School”. At these schools the children are cared for 7am – 7pm – and their families are deeply included. We need these in our poorer communities to break cycles that are 5 generations in the making.
6. The Minister must apologise and undo the completely facile division she has created by removing the Treaty of Waitangi clause from the Education Act. With well over half the schools already rejecting it shows the folly of listening to people like Hobson’s Pledge and Elizabeth Rata. The Minister simply did not under the sector on this and to call the school response “disgusting” just made it worse.
Short-Term Solutions
1. Seymour needs to step down from this role – or be removed. He is simply the wrong person and the results are showing it. James Meager?
2. Every school should be required to publish their attendance stats on their websites/Facebook – every week and to push the joint responsibility onto the community.
3. Where school breakfasts and lunches can make a difference – they should be well-funded and of high quality.
4. High quality broad media engagement and the value of school attendance.
5. Schools should not be allowed to take teacher-only days within the term. Each day either matters – or not.
6. Making all extra-curricular activities from sport, kapa-haka, productions, field-trips – dependent upon attendance.
7. Each school allocating 20 students per teacher for attendance and well-being monitoring. An attendance officer can have support value, but the influence of a teacher on a small group of students/families can be much greater.
8. Genuine money must be spent on broad media campaigns to “encourage” full attendance. Threatening parents with fines and jail is futile and pathetic and designed to appeal to a small section of the voting public.
Alwyn Poole, a well-known figure in the New Zealand education system, he founded and was the head of Mt Hobson Middle School in Auckland for 18 years. This article was published HERE
Full attendance statistics (90% of days attended)
There are three levels of solutions:
1. Societal Leadership
At present we have a genuinely chaotic education sector for a range of reasons. Protests re the removal of treaty clauses in the Education Act, strikes, 90 high schools opposing qualifications changes (60 supporting), no support from subject organizations re curriculum changes, many in the sector calling for a slow-down in curriculum changes.
The Minister – Stanford – has led by imposing – as opposed to convincing and leading her “team”. The sector sees her as someone who has listened to a small group of international idealogues, and a couple of detached NZ “academics” and chosen to barely engage with NZ educators. She could look to blames unions, rogue Principals, Maori academics – etc – but she knew the arena, or should have, before she entered it. Promising policies do not work without carrying the sector with you.
As I have written before David Seymour is exactly the wrong person to have the Ass. Minister responsibility for Attendance. He is publicly viewed to be anti-Maori/Pasifika and I would vote him the least likely to be able to encourage any child/family to get themselves to school. His handling of the school lunch situation has been appalling. There are two choices here – either – provide really high-quality school lunches (even if they cost more) as it makes children and families feel welcome and valued – or don’t provide them at all and genuinely put responsibility on parents.
The sector, as a whole, looks like they barely care. When, under the last government, there was a select committee investigation into school attendance – only 8 schools (of 2,600) submitted – and the committee chose not to seek any broad sector investigation. I.e. We have not detailed stats on why students are not attending. Nor do we know why we have up to 10,000 students not enrolled anywhere. Reasons for non-attendance are far more readily available in Australia – and we need to catch-up. We need to know this information for EVERY schools – and tailor the response.
In 2025 ERO reported – before the Term 3 decline – that things were improving and now “only” 31% of parents are comfortable with their children missing a week or more of school each term. They also noted that the government has allocated $140m over 4 years to support improvement. That is about 1.4% of VOTE Education. In 2022 ERO did produce a reasonably good report on attendance in NZ schools.
The Ministry of Education is seen by the sector to be highly ineffective and bogged down. The appointment of a long-term Deputy Secretary – involved in all of the most significant decline period – as the Secretary for Education – does nothing to assure anyone of genuine change in the Ministry towards being more effective in overseeing the education of our children.
Long-Term Solutions.
1. As a nation we need to deeply understand our crises in parenting. If your want our education system to work well then you need to understand the “glory days” of NZ being world leading (i.e. the 1970s) was not because out schools were simply fantastic – but because family and school values were closely aligned.
We have a significant portion of parents in NZ who have failed in their own education, have no affinity for schools, were often traumatized there, and have no heritage of good parenting.
Until we make great parenting the key attribute of NZ society – many schools are on a hiding to nothing. As I have advocated previously – we need an information based Crown Entity for Parenting with the key aim of improving the development of children from conception to 5yo.
2. Schools and teachers need to be a great deal better. There is a great deal of research on the competence of NZ teachers in certain areas (e.g. Maths) that is not encouraging. Children will not come to school and engage every day – unless they see the worth of doing so. This can include having great extra-curricula provision but making participation in it dependent on attendance and classroom behaviour/performance.
3. Schools need to make ALL parents very welcome in the school at all times. There are some schools who won’t let parents passed reception. Having high-quality interactions with parents and a genuine Community Liaison Manager in schools I have operated has made the family feel a part of the school community.
4. There needs to be full recognition that a significant number of students in NZ have logistical changes to get to school. Leavers’ data shows that students from poor homes are a long way behind those from wealthy homes. It also shows rural children are behind also. I lived in the Bay of Islands for six years. Some students need to wake at 5.30 each day – take two buses and a ferry to get to school – and the same to get home. They wake up in the dark and return in the dark. We need to develop hybrid schools.
5. A few years back I visited a wonderful New York organisation called Harlem Children’s Zone. They are what this article calls a “Full Service School”. At these schools the children are cared for 7am – 7pm – and their families are deeply included. We need these in our poorer communities to break cycles that are 5 generations in the making.
6. The Minister must apologise and undo the completely facile division she has created by removing the Treaty of Waitangi clause from the Education Act. With well over half the schools already rejecting it shows the folly of listening to people like Hobson’s Pledge and Elizabeth Rata. The Minister simply did not under the sector on this and to call the school response “disgusting” just made it worse.
Short-Term Solutions
1. Seymour needs to step down from this role – or be removed. He is simply the wrong person and the results are showing it. James Meager?
2. Every school should be required to publish their attendance stats on their websites/Facebook – every week and to push the joint responsibility onto the community.
3. Where school breakfasts and lunches can make a difference – they should be well-funded and of high quality.
4. High quality broad media engagement and the value of school attendance.
5. Schools should not be allowed to take teacher-only days within the term. Each day either matters – or not.
6. Making all extra-curricular activities from sport, kapa-haka, productions, field-trips – dependent upon attendance.
7. Each school allocating 20 students per teacher for attendance and well-being monitoring. An attendance officer can have support value, but the influence of a teacher on a small group of students/families can be much greater.
8. Genuine money must be spent on broad media campaigns to “encourage” full attendance. Threatening parents with fines and jail is futile and pathetic and designed to appeal to a small section of the voting public.
Alwyn Poole, a well-known figure in the New Zealand education system, he founded and was the head of Mt Hobson Middle School in Auckland for 18 years. This article was published HERE
5 comments:
What I think needs considering is the ideology current today in schools and homes. It is the child-centered ideology that promotes the sgency of the child in having them deciding what they will do , eat ,wear, ,learn etc. Earlier last century this insidious idea was not prevalent and adults dictated what a child did over most things.
Simply put children need old fashioned discipline . It was books like Marxist Freire 's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed ' , a standard educational text that states disciplining a child is oppression. Consequently we now have a generation of little monsters who will not be corrected nor follow instruction. This is not just perpetrated in homes but schools. Traditional values in homes and schools were part of the reason we excelled last century and incidentally the accelerated decline in standards started in the 1970s with the introduction of Whole Language and other progressive ideas like removal of spelling, grammar , rote learning tables, correcting written work and much more.
Our entire education system has been indoctrinated into extreme progressive ideology. which means they all sing from the same song book . Any dissenting voice is cancelled , There is a refusal to accept most of what is going wrong in our schools has anything to do with their entrenched ideology. For me it has everything to do with it.
Why go to school if you are are not going to be taught effectively and are going to languish in classes year in year out poorly literate and numerate ?
I agree parents should be involved. My mother taught 1500 remedial students intensive phonics reading by training up the parents as teachers of their own children. Parents should be treated as competent in teaching their own children at lower primary . The syllabus should be much more parent friendly ,with all the reading and maths work books going home each day .Methods of teaching should be comprehensible to parents .
There needs also to be an agreement with parents that schools are places for work not play , enjoyment and entertainment which is what progressivism promotes.
The methods Standford is installing are not based on prevailing ideologies but established science .NZ teachers have been fully indoctrinated into failing teaching methods and unions , academia the AEC , etc are actually aggressively Marxist and that is their agenda. The child's academic achievement has never been their aim .
This is a cultural war of Marxism vs traditional , including Christian and classical world views. CRT is behind the Maori content.
Think of yourself at age 14 in high school. Suddenly all this woo-woo starts and it is not even your culture. Kids with maori descent are thought of as special and ypu are taught yiur rellies colonised and stole all the land. How would you hace reacted? I would have thought sod this and would have bunked off as much as possible.
University class attendance is also abysmal as is timely work submission. Students come up with endless excuses to avoid late penalties. They spend more time finding excuses than just doing the work. The future of our workforce!
It is very pleasing to see Mr. Alwyn Poole expressing his perspectives on education on this platform. I agree with him on some details of his article, especially with his take on parenting and school attendance. Further, I agree with some of his proposed short term solutions, but disagree with others. Respectful disagreement is healthy and readers should consider Mr. Poole’s opinions very carefully.
I disagree that the Minister, Erica Stanford, should apologise for recent developments in education because it has taken much determination for her to get this far despite a great deal of resistance. Indeed, the resistance is itself very understandable because many people do feel strongly about the desired configuration of our education system, including the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in education, the national curriculum, pedagogy, teacher training, school management, meeting the needs of a diverse school population, and much more.
However, it is well known that education in New Zealand has been in decline for at least two decades and, clearly, strong measures are necessary. Surely all of us want the best from education for each and every one of our children and for each and every school. Disagreement is healthy but much depends on how we voice our disagreement.
Let us support the current development of education but continue to articulate our views, including dissenting opinions, politely and on the basis of reason. Let us attempt change through the power of persuasive argument rather than through the loudness of our voices and our invective.
The recent excellent results of Erica Stanford’s reforms (Beehive, 2025), early-stage admittedly, should serve to strengthen our support for her work and the efforts of her team. Right now it all appears to be very promising and let’s hope for much more.
Reference
Beehive (2025). Focus on basics delivers groundbreaking maths results
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/focus-basics-delivers-groundbreaking-maths-results
Mr. Poole.
We understand that many feel deeply about the Treaty of Waitangi, and New Zealand needs more dialogue here, but it is unfortunate that some people, clearly working against the reforms of Erica Stanford, have become extremely nasty on social media. We see not only bad language and repeated slights of public figures and senior education professionals, but online attacks on a certain young education professional – attacks that cast doubt unfairly on her personal integrity and that could threaten her reputation and career (Lillis, 2025). One man, himself a former education professional, has tried to call out this behaviour but has been attacked very viciously too.
This man attempted to expose the bad language and nastiness of certain bloggers and their followers but subsequently hundreds of followers joined in on an attack on the man’s character, his competence and even on his physical appearance. Along with many others, I have reviewed the relevant Facebook pages and confirm that it really is dreadful, and currently Netsafe is considering whether or not the page constitutes defamation within the scope of its own guidelines. Further, Facebook itself is reviewing the relevant material in line with its own protocols. Further reviews of material posted about the young education professional will be undertaken shortly.
I understand that complaints are currently being lodged with the appropriate authorities, including Netsafe and the Police, but it remains to be seen what can be done in practice beyond suggesting to bloggers that they close down the relevant pages. Unfortunately, the law is not very effective in dealing with online abuse, as opposed to hate speech, and Netsafe needs greater powers if we are to deal with the very serious problem of online harassment in New Zealand. Indeed, Netsafe informs me that the problem is widespread in this country.
It must feel quite horrible to have literally hundreds of commenters who do not know you, deliberately misrepresent your intent, and say very unpleasant things about you in the public environment, knowing that potentially thousands of people will see it all – including family, friends and employers. This kind of material is potentially very damaging, both reputationally and professionally. Both the young woman and the man who tried to call out the bad language and the very shabby treatment of the young woman are now squarely in that position. However, they are not the only ones to receive this kind of treatment, and several associates of mine who work in education and its reforms, tell me of considerable unpleasantness directed towards them too.
Unfortunately, those followers and commenters who support abusive online bloggers only encourage them. Mr. Poole - you seek an apology from Erica Stanford but, if any apologies are to be made, then they should come from those who engage in ridicule and who cause harm to the reputations of others.
I have not seen any of those who support Erica Stanford and her work in repairing education behaving like that towards those who hold dissenting perspectives. At the moment it seems to come mainly from those who oppose her reforms and it is not a good look! One way or the other, it is well past time for a refresh in education but also a refresh in our behaviour online.
Reference
Lillis, David (2025). Harassing Others Online. Breaking Views.
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2025/11/david-lillis-harassing-others-online.html
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