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.

Alwyn Poole: How to Improve Attendance in New Zealand.

School attendance in NZ is in deep trouble. Not just in reference to our historic levels but also compared to other OECD countries.

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.

David Farrar: More progress on school attendance

The latest Term 2 attendance data is out. Term 2 can be the most useful as that can be tracked back to 2011. The other terms only track back to 2019.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 26/9/24

Learning our sums from Stanford: $30m (for maths teaching) minus $30m (from te reo training) equals a new education initiative

Associate Education Minister David Seymour – committed to toughening up on the truancy that burgeoned when Labour was running the country – was encouraged by data released today which show increased school attendance in Term 2 of 2024. The numbers he highlighted show 53.2 per cent of students regularly attending school, an increase of 6.1 percentage points compared to the same term last year.

Hmm. Only around half of students regularly go to school.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 5/8/24

Seymour keeps count of truants while his colleagues are counting on being able to halt the slide in Kiwi maths results

Our leaders in the past few days have focused on education and what they are doing – or will be doing – to improve the schooling of our children.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour is braying about school attendance improvements over the first two weeks of term three, brandishing data to show “that when the government takes education seriously, so do New Zealanders”.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 18/7/24

Simon Watts is chuffed with emissions reduction plan – but climate experts have hastened to expose the shortcomings

Long before it was posted on the government’s official website today, the ministerial press statement with the greatest implications for the nation’s wellbeing no longer was news.

This is Climate Change Minister Simon Watts’ claim (it is a matter open to argument) that the Government’s draft Emissions Reduction Plan shows we can stay within the limits of the first two emissions budgets while growing the economy.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 8/5/24

Hurrah for coal – Shane Jones welcomes Genesis Energy’s import plans as natural gas production shrinks

A significant decline in natural gas production has given Resources Minister Shane Jones an opportunity to reiterate his enthusiasm for the mining and burning of coal.

For good measure, he has praised an announcement from Genesis Energy that it will resume importing coal.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 17/4/24

What’s the outfit you can hear going down the gurgler? Probably it’s David Parker’s Oceans Secretariat

Point of Order first heard of the Oceans Secretariat in June 2021, when David Parker (remember him?) announced a multi-agency approach to protecting New Zealand’s marine ecosystems and fisheries.

Parker (holding the Environment, and Oceans and Fisheries portfolios) broke the news at the annual Forest & Bird NZ conference that year: