Non-attendance at school is a key issue. Failure to be in school long enough (early leaving) or often enough (truancy) to gain basic skills and knowledge has personal and social costs. Unemployment, poverty, homelessness and criminal activity can often be linked to this basic failure.

Data about school non-attendance, truancy and suspensions is patchy, but the data available indicate that days absent per student, and rates of unexplained absence continue to rise very slightly in most years of schooling. From one calendar year to another there may be no large increase, but over several years the rises seem quite significant. However, in most states there are clear indications that non-attendance is being taken more seriously than in the past.

Policy responses to school non-attendance can be considered to be either punitive or curricular. A punitive policy may require schools to make greater efforts at surveillance of the whereabouts of their students, effect faster contact with parents of truants (for example, through SMS or emails), and with threats of legal action offered to combat persistent non-attendance. A curricular policy response may aim to change the curricular offerings and ethos of schools so that they become more attractive places to students. The two kinds of response are not mutually exclusive.

A paper prepared by ACER Senior Research Fellow Graeme Withers for the Dusseldorp Skills Forum, Disenchantment, Disengagement, Disappearance: Some recent statistics and a commentary on non-attendance in school, makes several recommendations:

• Measures to track students should be accompanied by school initiatives aimed at improving the quality of school life and learning conditions for those individuals or groups most at risk of disengagement and truancy.
• Responsibility for collection, interpretation and reporting of a wide range of school attendance data should be added to the Terms of Reference of the Performance Measurement and Reporting Taskforce.
• Presentation and publication of data should distinguish between authorised and unauthorised non-attendance; distinguish between long and short suspensions, exclusions and cancellations; itemise reasons for suspensions and exclusions; indicate rises and falls in proportions from one calendar year to the next, and from one year of schooling to another; and distinguish the existence or otherwise of appeal mechanisms in cases of expulsions.
• Data collected about absenteeism should include all schools (including Independent and Catholic) which are in receipt of public funds.
• Consideration should be given to at least matching the range of attendance data and their public availability as collected and published by the New Zealand Ministry of Education.

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