Special Debate — Inquiry into School Attendance—Report of Education and Workforce Committee

I move, That the House take note of the report of the Education and Workforce Committee on the inquiry into school attendance.

Talofa, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to kick off the debate on the report of the Education and Workforce Committee on the inquiry into school attendance. This was a robust and constructive inquiry, and as chair of the select committee, I’d like to begin by thanking all the submitters who took time to write or present to us, officials of the Office of the Clerk and Ministry of Education, and my colleagues on the select committee for their contributions in the sphere of this inquiry was handled in.

I will start with how and why this inquiry started. As we noted in the introduction of our report, regular school attendance is the foundation of student achievement, and it will be no surprise that research undertaken by the Ministry of Education has found a direct relationship between attendance and achievement. However, there has been an increase in chronically absent students since 2015, and it has doubled to 9 percent between 2016 and 2022. Longstanding challenges with regard to attendance rates have been further impacted by the two years of battling with a global pandemic, COVID-19. Forty percent of students with reduced attendance did not have concerning attendance patterns at the beginning of 2020, prior to COVID-19.

As I mentioned in my annual review debate contribution for the education portfolio last year, the Minister has noted his concern with school-attendance rates with the select committee in the past, particularly during the 2020 lockdown. During the annual review process, the Minister took the committee through the Government’s priority to set up a means of measuring and managing the speed at which attendance rates improved post lockdown. And I would like to thank the Minister for engaging with the committee, discussing what could be done to improve the attendance of schools and kura. Off the back of this, we initiated an inquiry into school attendance on 7 July 2021. We drafted terms of reference, seeking to understand the long-term trends and factors that have impacted school attendance, and that is why we looked at the 20-year period.

Within this, however, we were also interested in the changes made in 2013 to the ministry-funded Attendance Service and the impacts this has had on attendance and engagement outcomes. We wanted to hear directly from schools and other stakeholders to ensure we understood this as best as we could. Through this inquiry, we planned to identify examples of effective practice within schools and kura and other parties, where relevant, that have led to strong trends in attendance and engagement in schooling. This would allow us to identify potential strategies that could be implemented to increase attendance and inform the Government’s attendance strategy.

When submissions closed on 30 September 2021, we had received 133 submissions representing a range of perspectives and interests. They included students, parents, teachers, families of disabled or neurodiverse children, iwi, Attendance Service providers, and non-governmental organisations. We also had 55 oral submissions—six of which were specifically invited due to their success or experience in high levels of school attendance. In addition, we also conducted a survey, using the New Zealand Parliament Instagram account. The report on the review of the Standing Orders in 2020 recommended select committees use alternative forms of public engagement to make sure that we reach a wider range of New Zealanders. This being an inquiry into school attendance, it was very important that we heard from our rangatahi. So, through the survey on Instagram, we reached those students who otherwise may not have been able to make a submission. We received 49 responses to that particular survey, and I want to thank the Parliamentary Engagement team for their close work with us on this particular piece of work.

The ministry presented their final departmental report to us on 15 December 2021. I want to thank the ministry for their support and advice because they provided that important context that the submitters’ experiences were occurring within, and also, the work that was already under way. From the figures we were presented with, it was clear that attendance rates held largely steady from 2011 to 2015 before they started to decline. The decline can be seen across all ethnicities. However, it’s greater for Māori and Pacific students and is most heavily felt in our lower-decile schools. We said in our report that while societal causes for non-attendance cannot be solved by the education sector alone, it’s worth discussing what the sector can do and what they are already doing. So our report recommended the continuation of the Ka Ora, Ka Ako/Healthy School Lunches Programme—something that Ngāpuhi iwi social services mentioned was a contributing factor to seeing returns to school. Boyd Swinburn, professor at the University of Auckland, was in full support of the programme, calling it the biggest child-nutrition intervention, by far, in decades.

In regard to the in-school causes of declining attendance, we heard submitters that pointed to the importance of providing safe and inclusive learning environments. Nearly one quarter of the submissions commented that schools are not inclusive nor welcoming environments. We heard about how students can feel unsafe, alienated, and as if they don’t belong—stemming from racism, bigotry, bullying, academic streaming, and cultural competence.

I want to make a special mention of the following year 13 students: Sean Brownlow, student at Takapuna Grammar School; Silas Zhang, head student at Riccarton High School; Ashleigh Putt-Fallows, Southland Girls’ High School, Invercargill; and fa‘afetai to Iszak Tuala, year 13 student in Christchurch. It was great that we have these student voices amongst the 55 oral submissions that our select committee heard. They spoke to us about the importance of manaakitanga and of taking the holistic approach to issues of school attendance, and the need for complex and nuanced approaches to address these—with ākonga at the centre of that solution. These young submitters clearly understood that the underlying causes of non-attendance are complex and that there’s not an easy fix.

To quote our report, “Every part of the education system has a role to play in ensuring students feel safe and included at school. We acknowledge that schools have different approaches to achieving this, but we also recommend that the Government continue to engage with schools on the importance of the national education and learning priorities, that they support the Te Mahau to continue to facilitate local solutions to non-attendance, and that the Ministry of Education develops a communications plan about the importance of regular school attendance targeted at families and communities.” To address regular-attendance decline amongst Māori students, we supported uniquely Māori solutions for Māori students, including the further support and funding of Māori-medium schools, mixed-medium schools, iwi organisations, and Māori Attendance Service providers. Submitters told us of the importance of tino rangatiratanga and Māori-Crown partnerships and that the factors identified to impact attendance have led to Māori disproportionately suffering.

We had many other recommendations to make, from early intervention policies led by Te Mahau to prevent students from becoming chronically absent to the idea that any redesign of the Attendance Service should aim to improve its relationship with those providing early intervention. We heard from submitters holding a range of views on the Attendance Service, and we heard from some that the changes made in 2013 for efficiency reasons took the service out of local community hands—with one submitter describing this process as a restructuring being an outsider solution to a complex inside-the-community problem.

On the topics of what accountability measures and sanctions are used in other countries, the evidence provided through the committee concluded that punitive measures are proven to be ineffective in improving students’ attendance problems. Punitive measures do not address the underlying drivers of poor performance, especially for those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. We recognise that where some students would attend school regularly, there are barriers due to disability and neurodiversity. We recommended that the ministry, in conjunction with the new Ministry of Disabled People, establish a mechanism for monitoring the number of students who do not regularly attend school full time because of their learning-support needs. We also recommended to make increasing school attendance a focus of the highest-needs review. In total, then, our report makes 22 recommendations, and the Government response is due on 9 June. Our Education and Workforce Committee members are looking forward to it, and so am I.

I want to, again, thank everyone who took the time to contribute. All those who we heard from have made a really important contribution and helped shape the important piece of work. I’m proud of the finished report our committee has presented, and I think it will provide a strong foundation for long-term planning to address our declining attendance rate. In the words of the Minister, the Hon Chris Hipkins, “This is important and complicated work, which this Government is committed to funding and fixing.” Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d just like to echo some of the words of our chair, Marja Lubeck, and the thanks to the submitters—the 55 oral submitters that came along and spoke really passionately about what happened at their schools within their kāhui akos. We heard from principals, teachers, attendance officers, and parents and students alike. They all did a great job and informed the report that you see today.

The report starts by talking about the importance of attendance when it comes to achievement. It talks about the fact that there is no safe level of non-attendance at school. In my view, and the National Party view, education is your passport, your ticket to the future, and any level of non-attendance is diminishing your ability—or our students’ ability—to reach their full potential. It’s really interesting to take a look back, as we did in the report, about how we used to collect data, and how advanced we are today and the fact that it’s done electronically. And credit to the Government that in 2020 it was changed to mean that we collect data every single term.

Unfortunately, one of the things that came out of the report is the fact that there is a huge delay, a huge lag, when it comes to that data. So while we might collect data electronically every term, the delay in getting that data to the ministry, to politicians, and to the Minister is many, many, many months. In fact, it was only last week that the data from term 4 attendance was provided to the Opposition, but we know that it was only a couple of weeks before that that the Minister had it on his desk and the Associate Minister had it on her desk. Now, the question begs: how can the ministry direct resource to those schools most in need when there is a five-month delay in that data coming forward? I had a conversation with officials, just in the last few days, and they agreed on that front and said that they are working to try and bring that down. But the fact that there is such a very long lag in getting that data is a real problem.

One of the other things that came out of this is the fact that schools are not required to give their data—it is done on a purely voluntary basis. Now, while most schools do, in fact, give their data across, there are a number of schools who don’t. In the National Party minority view, we made the strong point that it should be mandatory for every school to make their data available. It should be collected and made available very quickly by the ministry and it should be publicly available.

I think it’s worthy of talking about the history because Marja Lubeck talked about the history. Indeed, there has been a decline over a very long time. But I would like to point out that the changes made in 2013 were for the reason that, at the time, the National Party were concerned that there were children falling through the cracks—at 66 percent I think; in 2019 we’re at 58 percent attending regularly. Back then, 66 percent, and we were very concerned about that. We wanted to give responsibility to varieties of groups, especially community groups and iwi, who knew their people and were, we believed, in a better place to connect with those communities, engage with those families, and engage with those students and get them back to school.

It’s worth of noting that in the two years that followed those changes, the rates went up to just under 70 percent of children attending regularly. In fact, in the just over four years between 2013 and 2017, when we left office, the rates of attendance only dropped by 3 percent. So we went from 66 percent to 63 percent attending regularly. So yes, it was a decline. But the decline really came in the two years between 2017 and 2019, when we saw a 6 percent drop. Now, I’m not convinced that the method of delivering the service is the one, big, silver bullet—it may be that this Government decide to change it. I’m not sure that rearranging those chairs is going to make a significant difference, I think there are other things—which I will go into. But I think it’s worthy of noting that over four years since the change, there was a 3 percent drop, and in the two years after Labour took office, a 6 percent drop.

I want to talk about also the effects of COVID. In the report, when you read it, it does mention the fact that we were at just over 58 percent of children attending regularly in 2019, indicating that this was a problem. You can’t blame it on COVID, although COVID, I would argue, has made things much worse and I’ll talk about that in a moment. But this existed well before COVID.

COVID made things much worse. Although the regular attendance data looks pretty similar, when you look at the chronically truant data, which has exploded over the last couple of years, that’s where we need to really put our efforts into. In the last five years, those numbers have over doubled. These are kids who are attending school less than 70 percent of the time. If you take it down to decile 1 schools, those kids are attending school 40 percent of the time. So it’s pretty shocking and we need to do a lot about it.

But the point is that over the two years of COVID we saw an explosion of these chronically truant kids. In fact, in term 4 alone last year—the data that we saw come out last week—we added an extra 10,000 kids to that list. We have 70,000 kids who are chronically truant, who are not attending school regularly—in fact, less than 70 percent of the time. That was 60 percent in term 3. But can I point out that in term 4 of 2019, right before we went into COVID, that was 40,000. We have added nearly 30,000 kids to the chronically truant list. Can I point out that half of those kids are Māori. We have failed, over COVID, the most vulnerable, low decile, and Māori populations. We have to put a lot more effort into those chronically truant kids.

We talk about the ministry having a strategy, and that’s all very well and good, but the point that I want to make today is that a number of the principals that came and spoke to us—and there are a couple in particular who I’ll speak of—made some really good points.

Firstly, there was a woman, her name was Karen Wellington, a principal in Upper Hutt of a decile 3 school—60 percent Māori, 50 percent Pasifika, and had a 90 percent attendance rate. Now, the points that she made resonated with me. She made points like, “We set expectations with parents, the relationships we have with our families are key, we have a plan for truancy, there is accountability in our school for the rates of attendance, we phone, we email, contact is ongoing, and there is constant contact with these parents.” They have a plan for those chronically truant kids—they are immediately reported by teachers. There is immediate action. There are two calls and the principal gets in her car, she drives to the student’s home, and she gets them out of bed. It is that accountability that’s so important.

Mark Brown from Newtown Primary School—a school of 400 kids, 70 percent of which are non-English speaking—again echoed those same comments. They have a plan, they have systems in place, they have strategies, expectations on parents, they make it easy for kids to get to school, they work closely with attendance officers, and their Māori kids attend school 90 percent of the time. I just want to bring to the House’s attention a comment that he made that resonated with me when he said schools need to be proactive and not accept that it’s OK to not turn up.

Now, what worries me over COVID is that we were asleep at the wheel. We put billions of dollars into keeping workers attached to their businesses and yet when it came to students attached to schools: almost nothing. The one thing that this Government did was put $50 million into a contestable fund that officials have admitted didn’t have any targets, didn’t have any outcomes, didn’t have any expectations, and they weren’t able to measure those outcomes. They did a post-report, they did a survey of schools after that, but that weren’t able to—in fact, there was a briefing to the Minister which actually says they weren’t able to confidently say that money increased attendance.

What I’m really worried about is that the Minister will do the same thing again, and she announced a $40 million package over the next few years to reduce truancy. Those officials I met with the other day, again, said there were no targets, no expectations, no accountability tied to that money. And how could that have gone through a Budget process with no outcomes? I’m worried we’re going to see the same things happen over again where we pour money in with no set expectations. Someone at the ministry needs to be accountable for school truancy rates, as do principals and boards of trustees. Thank you.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. First of all, I’d like to start by thanking teachers out there that have been doing all that they can do to make sure that they support our tamariki. I’m just mindful that it’s important that we support those that support our tamariki. I was just reflecting on a headline that popped up which said that teachers may be catching COVID-19 at a higher rate than other adults. Here’s the thing, right? If you’re talking about attendance, first of all, you need to make sure that our teachers are attending as well. So making sure that they have all the support that they need to actually be able to do this really, really important job should be at the forefront of all the different things that we are organising. I’m mindful that we face a possible second COVID-19 peak over winter. And, at the same time, as the open borders are bringing new viruses into communities, communities need an expert-led plan to support children’s access to education and protect children, school staff, and their families from COVID-19 and other winter respiratory infections.

So it’s important to really acknowledge the impact of COVID over the last couple of years. I do agree with previous speakers as well. What COVID-19 did was just put a limelight, if you like, over the problems that were already there. We already had an inequality crisis—it was already there—and COVID has just exacerbated that. That was already there as well. I think it’s really, really important, and that’s what I learnt over the process at the times that I managed to attend the select committee as well, which was well chaired by Marja Lubeck. I’m not a permanent member of the select committee, but I often visit and I do enjoy and like the deep reflections that many that have come from the education sector, the members around the committee, bring to this debate but also educational issues in particular.

I think it’s really important that we don’t get lost and see the wood between the trees. It’s important to not get lost in the weeds. It’s important to step back and actually take a look at the whole forest. If I can extend this metaphor, as well, we’ve got to understand the part that education plays in the whole ecosystem of all of our social determinants, which impact on whether tamariki can attend school or not.

Because here’s the thing, right? If the tamariki, the children, who are hungry show up to lunch, well, that’s an impact on the educational outcome. If they’ve got to take time off work because mum or dad or uncle or auntie or granddad or grandma, or whoever’s at home, can’t work and they’ve got to go take some shifts down at the supermarket, that impacts upon their educational outcomes. If they can’t call the school, well, then, that impacts their educational outcomes. So we’ve got to look at all of that.

I do acknowledge the comment in the report which said that the wider societal causes of non-attendance include housing affordability, transience, and poverty. Social causes of non-attendance cannot be solved by the education sector alone. So we’ve got to be mindful of that.

But I think it’s really important for us—to sort of pretend and throw our hands up in the air to say that this stuff is all difficult, because there are certain things that we can do. We can commit to livable incomes for everybody. We can commit to warm housing. We can commit to making sure that most of people’s wages aren’t getting pulled off on to rentals or high mortgages and so on and so forth. We’ve got to create that foundation, because the concern that I have—and I do take the point around the data; data must be strong. We must be able to analyse what the situation is. But, then, if we just pour on and devolve all of this responsibility to teachers, all of this responsibility on to schools, and not give them the resources, not provide those wrap-around services and not to give those wrap-around services which should also be culturally appropriate as well, then we are not doing our jobs properly. We’ve got to see this whole thing; take a step back and look at how education is impacted by all these other different factors.

If I can just say, because I don’t have much time here, it’s really important that we commit to making sure that every child deserves a high-quality, free, accessible public education that gives them the best possible start in life. This is what we must commit to. We want all children to reach their full potential and to make sure that we take a step back and understand what those levers are and to deal with the poverty issues within some of our communities. If we commit to that and we see the links between housing, income, and health, we will do the job that Aotearoa New Zealand has elected us to do. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

💬 Truancy: the action of staying away from school without good reason. The ACT Party believes—I’m sure, like most people—that that reason would have to be pretty good, and no amount of truancy can really be accepted. I was a bit concerned when the report first got initiated that it might become an avenue to attack the school system and teachers, but I’m really pleased that it didn’t occur, and the committee did a great job in sticking to the problem and didn’t get too side-tracked with some potentially divisive issues.

There are a lot of things going on in people’s lives that affect kids going to school, but education is the most important thing that determines happiness and success, and we must treat it with the importance it deserves—not just academic subjects but going to school builds relationships. They learn how to get on with people, along with the sporting and the cultural activities. It’s hugely important to students when they’re developing their own identity and creating a thriving community. When I went through teachers college in the early 1980s, one of my best lecturers said to us all, “Just remember that the majority of a student’s learning is done outside of the classroom.” A teacher’s role is a complex mixture of passing on academic, pastoral, and life skills to ensure that students have the ability to face what the big wide world has to offer when they leave.

The report identifies a number of areas that are working and things that need to change in today’s schools. The recommendation that truancy be a focus for the Education Review Office will, I think, be enough to make schools look very hard at their processes. I had to laugh when the committee was discussing truancy targets and a Green Party member confidently stated, “Targets don’t work.”

I’d like to thank all of the submitters and all of those who contributed to this report—the many opinions about what the issues were and what should be done about them, from changing the Curriculum, changing school hours, to getting truancy officers, all sorts. There were some common themes. Having the rules and expectations firmly set in place when parents enrol their child was a big one and, I think, was really important.

Bullying came up quite a few times and needs to be taken seriously. We must remember that bullying isn’t confined just to one demographic, and that to concentrate energy in any one particular area can become quite divisive. I know a student who changed schools because of the constant bullying about her red hair. But alongside dealing with bullying, schools must also teach resilience and give students the tools to deal with some of the unkindness they might face and the ability to function in all situations. This means parents and teachers making rules, setting boundaries, and challenging students’ behaviours; it doesn’t mean just being their friends.

Another common theme brought up by many submitters was the huge issue of the increased need for mental health services in our schools. I believe many adults, and a number of people in this House, are responsible for the huge increase in the need for this service. Kids need hope. They need to know that there’s a purpose for everything they do, whether that’s studying maths, training for netball, or practising their violin. There has to be an end goal. In the quest for a better planet, the promise of hope and purpose has gone for many young people. They see no purpose in living in or contributing to a world that they’re told daily is going to end. Rhetoric like “Keep under 1.5 degrees for our survival” and constant talk of mass extinctions, from those to my left, is messing with kids’ heads in a huge way. Climate anxiety or eco-anxiety are common mental health issues now. Whatever message is intended, we must still give kids hope that they have a bright future and there’s a reason to look forward to it. I was teaching in 2019, and condoning climate strikes is condoning truancy. You just can’t have it both ways.

From my experience, two things are imperative to a young person succeeding. The first are parents. Read to your kids. Numerous studies have shown that kids who arrive at school with a basic reading ability are ready to learn and are at a huge advantage from day one. The second thing is for teachers. Teachers must genuinely care about their students. Kids are perceptive and won’t want to come to school if they think that the teacher doesn’t really care. Truancy isn’t just a school problem. All of those involved in a young person’s life—parents, whānau, other agencies, and teachers—have a part to play in ensuring that a child has the best opportunity to fulfil their potential. Kids haven’t changed, but the way we treat them has. Gone are the days when police dropped students off to school in their pyjamas—I did that a few times—but we adults need to step up. Attending school regularly will go a long way to helping all kids to succeed, and I’m actually pretty optimistic about the future.

Tēnā tātou e hika mā, tēnā tātou i Te Whare, talofa lava. Tēnā tātou i te āhuatanga o ō tātou mate ki tērā o tātou pāpā ki a Jack Taumaunu kua whakahoki atu ki Whangārei i tēnei rā, nō reira tēnā tātou.

[Greetings, everyone, greetings to us all in the House, greetings. Greetings to you all, in the light of the many recent deaths, specifically of one of our uncles Jack Taumaunu who has returned to Whangārei today, therefore, greetings one and all.]

Well, I’m reminded of my own schooling experience and the experiences of many other Māori in the mainstream education system today, and I stand here to address some of the committee’s recommendations to keep tamariki in school.

Experiences that are so normal for Māori they can’t be so easily captured in reports and parliamentary inquiries—experiences of having their taonga ripped from their necks, to cover tā moko, to cut their hair, which is tapu to tangata whenua and tangata moana. I know of too many tamariki who have had to take days off because their school does not provide kai or because their classroom is damp and cold and their winter jacket does not match their uniform, or because the teacher pronounces their names wrong when reading out the roll, or because they come from poorer whānau who live in poorer communities—housing issues, social issues, health issues, etc. I recently learnt of a teacher in a high-decile primary school who would leave the names of the kids whose parents had not paid their school fees on the whiteboard to shame them in front of the kids whose parents had. All the names on the board were Māori. I could go on for days, but I only have five minutes.

These are the tamariki we are talking about. Most of them do not know how to speak up for themselves against poor teachers and against poor schools. Some of them eventually just stop turning up, and who can blame them. It has always been clear to Te Paati Māori that the mainstream Pākehā education system fails our tamariki. It is racist by default. It is a hostile environment for Māori and especially for students from lower-income families.

So I would like to acknowledge the Education and Workforce Committee for running this inquiry, and I would like to endorse a few of the recommendations, in particular the recommendation to further support and fund Māori-medium schools. If you need a road map for this, feel free to look at Te Paati Māori’s policy manifesto, which would ensure that all Māori-medium education from kōhanga reo to kura kaupapa, kura ā iwi, wharekura, and whare wānanga are funded equal to their mainstream equivalents. Māori-medium education not only immerses children in te reo Māori but in tikanga kaupapa and wairua Māori. It is a holistic approach that is the foundation of kaupapa like Te Aho Matua, which probably should be the kaupapa for every school, which provides pathways for education, educational, cultural, social, and spiritual achievement and excellence.

We also can’t lose sight of the fact that most Māori students are in mainstream education. We need to ensure that those students are embraced for who they are, are able to learn their reo and history, that we invest in Māori models of delivery, that there are Māori staff on senior leadership teams, and that all teachers are skilled in te reo Māori competencies.

I would like to endorse the recommendations that the Government continue to provide period products to schools and continue the school lunches programme. Te Paati Māori would like to see that expanded to free breakfasts and lunch to be funded in all low-decile primary and intermediate schools.

Te Paati Māori support the committee’s view on punishment for absenteeism. We would actually remove the ability for schools to expel students who are below the school leaving age of 16 altogether. We know Māori students make up 50 percent of the students who are excluded from school and the irreparable harm this causes. If you need evidence, just look at the fact that 55 percent of prisoners have been kicked out of school.

I want to conclude by acknowledging students with disabilities, neurodiversity, and learning differences who have been most let down by our system. Around 26 percent of Māori identify as disabled, 40 percent of the Māori adults with disabilities have no formal education qualification, almost double the proportion of non-disabled Māori. We need to massively overhaul funding for support teachers, appropriate facilities, and professional development for all teachers. I was shocked to find in the Māori Affairs Committee inquiry into learning support for ākonga Māori that of the 600 learning support staff across the country, only two fulltime-equivalents were designated for kura kaupapa Māori and Māori-medium schools. We need to establish a task force led by Māori with the mandate to transform how Māori students with neurodiversity and learning differences are taught and supported. Otherwise they become problematic because these issues, they start as behavioural, then eventually criminal because this is how the school and society see them. I think a Māori education authority is in order. Kia ora tātou.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to take a call on behalf of the other four education Ministers we have in this Government, and I’d like to thank the committee who participated in the inquiry for your work. I’d like to also take the opportunity to respond to three points that other speakers have made.

I’d like to acknowledge the contribution of Erica Stanford. She spoke about schools setting expectations in terms of achievement and then following up on those expectations. If I could tell a little anecdote about my time as a school principal, the last school I was principal of had average attendance of about 85 percent and I said that wasn’t good enough, and I set an arbitrary figure of us having average attendance of 96 percent, which was two days of term that I said was acceptable that a child could be absent.

All we did—and there’s some real low-tech things that schools can do. [Member’s phone rings]. Sorry about this. There’s some low-tech things that schools can do. What we did was we actually employed somebody who was on a benefit and topped up their benefit by $30 to $40 a week, and their job was to collect the rolls every day and then to ring up the parents whose children were absent. We found that although they hated it—because we sort of did harangue them a bit—it actually did make them accountable. We got the attendance up to about 93, 94 percent. That was a very low-tech solution.

I’d also like to acknowledge what Chris Baillie mentioned about bullying. Bullying is an issue and it is something that drives children away from school. Now, I was told when I became the principal of Kaitaia Intermediate that the whole school was feral, that, you know, it was just terrible, that the misbehaviour was atrocious, and that all the kids were bullies. So what I did, another low-tech solution, was put a piece of paper in front of each of the children in the school—there’s about 300 in the school—and I asked them two questions: “Have you been bullied in the last month; and if the answer is yes, write the name of the bully.”

We found that out of those 300 kids, there were six that were bullies, and we focused and targeted the behaviour of those six children. The Ministry of Education did a bit of a survey at the start of May of the one year and then they came back in May of the next year. They found that there’d been a 90 percent reduction in bullying at the school—a very low-tech solution.

Thirdly, I’d just like to address the issue that Rawiri Waititi raised about Māori-medium education. Now, only 10 percent of our Māori children actually attend either kura kaupapa or bilingual units in mainstream schools. That’s not good enough; just 10 percent. We know that children in those kaupapa Māori settings actually achieve better and attend better.

That’s why we have said that we would like to raise or triple the numbers of Māori children attending kaupapa Māori schools from 10 percent to 30 percent. That means there’s about 20,000 Māori young people now in kaupapa Māori education; we’d like to make that 60,000 by 2040, which means 250 more kura, which means 3,500 extra fluent kaiako. That means, you know, obviously resourcing of those kura and resources to support those teachers to teach bilingually. So there is work going on that the Government is trying to do to make education more attractive.

I’d also like to acknowledge the comments of a mentor of mine, or a principal when I was a young principal starting at Kaitaia Intermediate School. An older principal at Carmel intermediate school by the name of John Smith said to me, “Kelvin, what you need to do is make sure that school is the best adventure in town.” So if young people are excited about what they’re going to do each day in school—if they’re looking forward to what they’re going to do—then they’ll be there at school.

So we’ve got to make sure that schools cater for—are relevant; the curriculum that we teach in schools is relevant to the children. So Māori children need to have the kapa haka, there needs to be the sport, there needs to be the outdoor education, the camps, the science experiments—all those sorts of things that really excite our young people and get them into school. We can’t sort of just narrow down the curriculum to just reading, writing, and arithmetic, because if they’re drilled with that, then it actually turns them off education. We know that our young people like to—as well as, you know, reading, writing, and arithmetic is important, but it’s not the only thing. We need to make sure that we provide a balanced curriculum so that all children will find something that they can be successful at and want to be at school.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in this debate. Having initiated this inquiry back last year when I was the education spokesperson for National, I’m thrilled that it was carried out by the select committee and that they highlighted the importance of the issue, because, you know, the reality is, looking at the education sector in New Zealand, there’s an obvious issue around our falling achievement in terms of literacy and numeracy, which is fundamental to our nation’s prospects in the future and the prospects of the lives of the young people coming through so they can succeed and do well in the global environment and be able to obtain good jobs and a good living and be able to look after their families well. A good, global standard of education is one of the most important gifts we can give anybody in this country.

When you’re looking for reasons why we might be falling off the pace, a pretty obvious place to start is, well, are the kids actually at school? The answer, of course, has been, well, not many of them have been. I started a year or so ago looking at the Ministry of Education’s website, and in all the priorities and all the programmes and plans and all sorts of things that have been discussed—curriculum review, all sorts of other things—nowhere was there any real focus on that core issue of whether the kids are at school or not. So we raised this issue time and again last year, and the biggest shock I had was rocking up to Whitiora primary school in Hamilton one day, talking to the headmaster, who said that their average regular attendance, the number of kids in the school regularly attending school, was only 15 percent, and I couldn’t believe it—I couldn’t believe it—and it had been that way for years. And across the country, the average is only 60 percent, which is staggeringly appalling, but there are so many, many schools where it’s only 15 percent or 30 percent or 40 percent. The previous speaker, the Hon Kelvin Davis, mentioned Māori immersion schools being so much better in terms of attendance. That’s not true, actually; it’s about 50 percent regular attendance across that sector as well.

So in all these places, the kids are not at school, and the issue that we face, most fundamentally, is that we’ve allowed a culture of excuses to develop in this area. I couldn’t believe how many principals and how many people in the education sector would come up with all manner of excuses as to why the kids weren’t there—“it’s all a bit hard.” We heard that from the previous speaker, who was saying, effectively, that school’s not exciting enough, and, you know, if you make them do maths, they’ll find it difficult and they won’t want to come. That is such a backwards way of looking at the issue, and that is why our maths achievement is falling off the cliff. It’s not that maths is too hard; it’s that we’re not doing an effective job at teaching it in many cases. Of course, there are some brilliant maths teachers out there doing a brilliant job, and I encourage them, with every opportunity, to do more. But across the board, we are failing to engage our kids on these topics.

So we have to drop the culture of excuses. The best example I saw of that was Manurewa Intermediate, where there’s a flashing sign out in front of the school saying, #NoExcuses and “Get your kids to school!” That culture of no excuses, there is no excuse, whether you’re feeling a bit off colour—well, that’s not to say that if you’ve got a particular sickness you should be at school, but there is a whole lot of excuses that are given for why kids are not regularly at school, and we shouldn’t accept them. We should see it as an absolute necessity for parents to get them to school.

The critical thing is to get some accountability back into the sector. Parents, of course, are the ones who are most accountable for ensuring that their kids are at school. At the moment, of course, there are no consequences for anybody anywhere if they don’t send their kids to school, and that has to change. There’s no consequences for the school, of course. The principal, in my view, should be thinking about nothing else—well, first and foremost, “Are the kids at school, and what am I doing in my school to ensure that they’re turning up regularly?” And there should be some accountability for that school. If, year in, year out, only 30 percent are turning up, there needs to be some very, very serious questions asked; there needs to be change, not continuing on as we carried on. Secondly, we need to have inspectors out there knocking on doors, making sure the kids are at school, and making sure they turn up. And that has fallen off a cliff over the last 4½ years.

So I’m very pleased that we’ve done this report. There is so much work to do and there is no more important thing that can be done in the education sector. Thank you.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to stand to do a short speech on the report that the Education and Workforce Committee did into non-attendance at school. I’m a member of this committee, and I actually found the experience to be really, really positive, despite the huge challenges that we face in relation to attendance in New Zealand.

In reflection of what the previous speaker—the Hon Paul Goldsmith—was saying about attendance, I actually didn’t hear excuses from the principals and schools that came to talk to us; what I heard was solutions. I think the answers to non-attendance in New Zealand are already known, I think they’re known within the sector, and I think what we were able to do in the select committee was really examine the issue, look at how widespread it was, look at best practice, and look at how things are working in certain schools and in certain communities to really increase attendance. So I actually found it really positive and I did find that the people that were submitting were providing very, very useful solutions to what is—and I think we all accept around the House—a very serious problem that we’re all taking very seriously.

This inquiry was actually initiated as part of the select committee, and it was genuinely initiated from both sides of the House, because, I think, we do agree that there is value in looking into this problem. What we found was that there’s not a single reason for non-attendance in New Zealand; there’s a myriad of reasons why children might not attend school. Some of those reasons are to do with the design of the schooling system itself. The other reasons that we found were things that people might not assume were included in non-attendance—for example, if you go on holiday, you get permission from the school, that’s still included as non-attendance and is still included in the statistics. Obviously, there’s the really obvious thing that we’ve dealt with through COVID, which is sickness, which has definitely been exacerbated through the period of the pandemic. And there are equity issues, and I think we all accept that there are serious equity issues within the education system, as there is in society itself, that should be addressed, as well.

So why did we end up in the situation where we had attendance that is lower than what we would expect in this country? I think we can look to relatively recently when we had a decentralisation of the Attendance Service under the previous National Government in 2013. Now, the problem with this was that it meant that the problem of school attendance was taken away from the communities that know the students and actually put into a centralised form with people that didn’t necessarily know the communities they were working in and didn’t necessarily know the students or the families or the issues that they faced. Since that time, we’ve seen that school attendance has been declining, since 2015, and, as we know, and we can expect, COVID-19 has made those statistics worse. So what we found was that all of those were contributing factors to the situation we are now in where we would like to increase our school attendance. The reason that we want to increase school attendance is not because we want to punish students. We want students to be at school because we know that high attendance is likely to lead to better academic success, and better academic success is likely to lead to success in the future, and we all want that, I think, for our students.

So in this inquiry, we did a few unusual things. We did engage with the Parliamentary Engagement team. We had responses from school students—we really wanted to hear from them. We had, I think, submissions from students who are actually at school, who were reflecting on what their fellow students had said were the reasons they weren’t attending, which was really, really important and valuable feedback to have. We had interest from colleagues around the House. I’d like to acknowledge my colleagues Barbara Edmonds and Shanan Halbert for attending the committee, because they had a particular interest in this area and also supporting submitters from their areas. So we had a really positive, as I reflected earlier in my speech, experience.

The reasons we found for non-attendance, as I have mentioned earlier, were bullying, health-related absences, disabilities, lack of household resources—a huge range of issues, including things like a lack of access to period products, which this Government has tried to address; and food insecurity.

In the brief time I have left, I just also want to mention another initiative that my colleague Ingrid Leary has been working on with the Human Rights Commission, which is the new school uniform guidelines. They were launched last week by the Human Rights Commission, and the Race Relations Commissioner, Meng Foon, described them as huge. They will help increase inclusivity and that feeling of belonging within schools.

Now, we are expecting the Government’s response to this report early this month, and we really look forward to seeing that and I hope that it includes a lot of the recommendations that we made. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m very pleased to rise and speak on this inquiry which was initiated by one of my colleagues the Hon Paul Goldsmith.

This report highlights—and my colleagues have also emphasised it—this rise in chronic absenteeism: 70,000 young people chronically absent from our schools. That’s a huge number, and when I think of it in context, it’s 50 percent more than the size of Invercargill City. It is a large number of young people that are not in school, and it is, quite frankly, frightening.

One of the things that I was pleased to see that came through in the report was the noting of barriers due to disability or neurodiversity. I’m very pleased that the report notes that this needs to be monitored in the context of learning support needs. That will be something that I’ll be paying particular attention to.

But I want to talk about those young people that don’t particularly enjoy traditional success in our schools. I saw a lot of this in the vocational education sector. In fact, I listened to the Hon Kelvin Davis talking about the things that excited some young people in schools, and I thought he was reading out a very good description of charter schools which, obviously, offered some different experiences for those that don’t necessarily achieve in the traditional school environment.

My fear is that the young people that I was dealing with in the vocational education sector who weren’t necessarily enjoying traditional success in the school environment are now not there at all. I saw the work that we had to do embedding numeracy and literacy in level 1 to level 4 vocational qualifications to try and bring those young people up to speed with their numeracy and literacy, because many of those young people were the ones that went on to be our outstanding young trades people. They were young people who were really good at practical skills. They knew how to do and make and fix things, and so they are a really important part of our society. My fear is that we won’t have those young people coming through, because they’ve gone from not enjoying school to actually not being there at all.

I think we are in real danger of having depleted a pool of young people who would have been coming through to fill some of those trades roles in the future. I’m really concerned that this is a Government that has been characterised by having strategies and announcements but inaction. This is a problem that cannot have inaction. This is a problem that can’t just have academic debate and working groups. It must have action or we are going to be providing a disservice to 70,000 young people—70,000 young people every year who are missing out on the basics of schooling. If you miss out on the basics of schooling, those people are being abandoned and being led into a life of poverty, a life of crime, a life of being disenfranchised from society. And so we’re setting up not only those individuals for a life of misery, but our communities and our country is going to miss out on those thousands of young people who should be going forward and having meaningful careers and meaningful lives.

This is a serious problem: 70,000 young people not in school is a serious problem, and we cannot afford inaction. We must see real solutions to solve this problem. We will be watching this Government very closely that they come up with solutions. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. Today, it is not an economics lesson; today, we’ll start with a history lesson, shall we, from someone who was in the thick of it in 2010 when the challenges of student engagement and achievement were brought to the attention of the Hon Anne Tolley. And she responded. She reviewed the systems and how they respond to our vulnerable students, and she made some reforms, including putting more money into prosecuting parents. I wonder why that didn’t work. She also reformed the truancy service, as we’ve heard, combining 77 district services and the non-enrolled service into contracts with 11 providers nationwide, including the establishment of the electronic service. Over the years, the number of those providers has grown, because it was really clear from the outset that what got lost in there was the relationships in our communities, our ability as teachers and their schools to connect with whānau, to wrap around their children.

Their intentions were good—continuity and improvement—something that I acknowledged, as the president of the Post Primary Teachers’ Association at the time, but there were concerns raised by us at the time that this new national structure would be too far removed from school communities, students, and their whānau, and relationships would not be sustained. In 2015, not only was the Attendance Service stretched but schools, as they always do, stepped up. They employed truancy officers for themselves. They knocked on doors. We heard that from the Opposition this afternoon. And they worked really hard to provide additional wraparound support for those who started to develop a pattern of non-attendance. But this heroic model is not sustainable, and our schools and students deserve more. In our recent inquiry, we heard that the current situation is worse and has been exacerbated by COVID. We heard from numerous organisations, schools, teachers, and most importantly our students about the impacts—not only the reasons why they’re not attending school but the impact that has on their lives.

But there is hope, Mr Baillie. Just like with climate change, being honest about the problem means that you can collaborate and come up with a solution. We learn from our innovators. We learn from our communities that were successful in turning things around—just like our honourable Minister reflected this afternoon, about how we can effect change. Schools did step up, and in our inquiry, as Camilla Belich pointed out, we got stories of hope. We got stories of hope, and the recommendations are extensive, evidence-informed, and actually show that localised, responsive, well-resourced solutions are what we need—not excuses but reasons. Being honest about the problem means you can address it. And I’m really pleased that all of those challenges, about having to do something—we’ve got an answer for that; obviously somebody wasn’t paying attention over the last couple of weeks. We haven’t sat around. This year’s Budget: early interventions, student attendance around school lunches, period products—let’s see, Incredible Years, Check & Connect, kaupapa Māori interventions, PB4L refresh. And then, when things get a bit tougher, Mana Ake, counselling in schools, the regional response fund. This is about empowering our communities to look after our students.

I heard something about charter schools. Well, funnily enough, a bit of a history lesson about those, too. There is nothing we saw in a charter school—nothing—that is not already supported in our dynamic and diverse system that we currently have. The only thing they had differently: they had more cash, all right? We are proud of our system, and we know that with better support our communities and our schools can respond to the needs of our students going forward. I hate to channel my mother, but sometimes she gives me a bit of an “I told you so” moment. Well, this is a bit of an “I told you so” moment. If the last review and reform to attendance issues had been better engaged with our students, with their whānau, with schools and teachers, with iwi and NGOs at the outset, as we have done through this inquiry, and as our Ministers have done as they have pursued this issue relentlessly, we may not have had, more than a decade on, reforms that did not work. They did not work. I’m proud of what we’re going to do—

Order! The member’s time has expired. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Motion agreed to.

Report noted.

I declare the House in committee for further consideration of the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Bill