Alwyn Poole: Just how deep our school attendance crisis is

1. At last count 10,000 5 to 13 year olds in NZ were not enrolled anywhere and no one was actively looking for them.

2. Approx. 11,000 children are home-schooled. These children are not “truant” but it does indicate an amount of dis-engagement with our state system.

3. Term 3 2025 attendance data showed a statistically significant decline on Term 3 2024.

4. Daily attendance statistics in term 4 2025 showed more decline:

“The government wanted 80 percent of students attending more than 90 percent of their classes – the benchmark for regular attendance. To reach that goal, daily attendance needed to reach and remain at 94 percent, but the highest point reached in term four was 90 percent, with 88-89 percent recorded often and average daily attendance of 85 percent, similar to term three.”

5. Australia considers themselves to be in deep crisis mode with attendance as their full attendance (students attending 90% of the time) is at 60%. Ours is at 50%.

These comments are important:

“We can’t nudge our way out of this crisis. Australia needs a wholesale rethink of how to get children back into the classroom. We are not alone. Many countries have had problems getting school attendance to where it needs to be. But some have taken the issue far more seriously than us. England is one such country we can learn from. Students in England attend school 94 per cent of the time, compared to Australia’s 89 per cent. England has made attendance a national priority, driving a relentless public messaging campaign to elevate the importance of school attendance, radically increasing the transparency of attendance data, setting higher expectations for families and schools, and adopting a whole-of-government approach to tackle barriers to attendance.”

As I have said many times, curriculum changes, “structured literacy”, etc – can only produce marginal gains if the children who need help the most are attending school irregularly – at best.

Just released NCEA/UE cohort data (as opposed to leavers data that comes out later) shows a small improvement in L1 NCEA but declines in Level 2 NCEA and UE (key indicators).

Education in NZ in 2026 needs a great deal of work – from attendance to achievement. Let’s hope.

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