Attendance figures

Chris Luxon said today on RNZ Morning Report that “55% of kids aren’t going to school regularly”.  On Twitter, Simon Britten said “In Term 1 of 2022 the Unjustified Absence rate was 6.4%, up from 4.1% the year prior. Not great, but also not 50%.”

It’s pretty unusual for NZ politicians to make straightforwardly false statements about publicly available statistics, so if there are numbers that seem to disagree or are just surprising, the most likely explanation is that the number doesn’t mean what you think it means.   It sounds like we have a disagreement about facts here, but we actually have a disagreement about which summary is most useful.

New Zealand does have an ongoing problem with school attendance — according to the Government, not just the Opposition.  The new Attendance and Engagement Strategy document (PDF) says that the percentage of regular attendance was  59.7% in 2021, down from  69.5% in 2015. The aim is to raise this to 70% by 2024 and 75% by 2026.

So if the unjustified absence rate is 6.4%, how can the regular attendance rate be 59.7% or 45%?  “Regular attendance” is defined as attending school at least 90% of the time — so if you miss more than one day per fortnight, or more than one week per term, you are not attending regularly.

For example, suppose half the kids in NZ missed one week and one day in term 1. The absence rate would be about 12% but the regular attendance rate would be 50%.  The unjustified absence rate could be anything from 0% to 12%. It’s quite possible to have a 5% unjustified absence rate and a 50% regular attendance rate.

Now we want more details. They are available here.  The regular attendance rate is down dramatically this year, from 66.8% in term 1 last year to 46.1% in term 1 this year. The proportion of half-days attended is down less dramatically, from 90.5% in term 1 last year to 84.5% in term 1 this year.  Justified absences are up 4.5 percentage points and unjustified absences up by just under 2 percentage points.

What’s different between term 1 this year and term 1 last year?

Well…

It wouldn’t be surprising if a fair fraction of NZ kids took a week off school in term 1, either because they had Covid or because they were in isolation as household contacts.  That’s what should have happened, from a public health point of view.  It’s actually a bit surprising to me that justified absences weren’t even higher. Term 1, 2022, shouldn’t really representative of the long-term state of schools in NZ.  Attendance rates were higher before the Omicron spike; they will probably be higher in the future even without anti-truancy interventions.

It’s reasonable to be worried about school attendance, as the Government and Opposition both claim they are. I don’t think “55% of kids aren’t going to school regularly”  is a particularly good way to describe a Covid outbreak.  Last year’s figures are more relevant if you want to talk about the problem seriously.