Can we sort out the messy state of school attendance?

A police officer speaks to a 14-year-old Auckland boy out of school without permission. PHOTO:...
A police officer speaks to a 14-year-old Auckland boy out of school without permission. PHOTO: THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD
Dear Uncle Norm,

I’m afraid we become dumber and dumber.

Our country now has the lowest school attendance in the entire Anglosphere.

A crippling truancy freefall began well before Covid. Attendance records show that by 2019 nearly four out of 10 Kiwi children weren’t school regulars. ("Regular" is 90% attendance. The stats are even worse for Maori.)

What about the future impact of this rolling disaster? Might it be as bad as climate change? To own a decent life people must also own an education. To get an education they must attend school. If New Zealand can’t get our kids there, we take yet another step towards the failed state.

The Government has announced a modest plan to restore "regular" attendance to 70% by 2024, and 75% by 2026. But their plans don’t often convert to reality.

Can this mess be sorted?

Fed-up parent.

Let’s first acknowledge an awkward truth.

Most New Zealanders believe we have a system called compulsory education.

But this is now a lie. Compulsory education, proudly launched in 1887, has become voluntary education. Many, many children go to school when they or their parents choose.

It’s true parents may be fined $30 a day for truant children. But in 2019 only one parent of our 40,000 "chronic" truants faced the majesty of the law. By 2020 we’d successfully managed this figure down to zero.

This, when chronic truancy, (that’s less than bare-bones 70% attendance) had DOUBLED over the eight preceding years.

The Ministry of Education says it is "inappropriate" to fine parents because the first pointer to truancy is poverty.

The thought is at least partially right — there are more difficulties for poorer children getting to school. But what’s also true is times have changed. We have lowered our expectations of people.

Schools still keep daily attendance records and the agency for chasing truants is the ministry’s Attendance Service. Stupidly, its resources were cut back by the National government in 2015. It is to be rebooted, using part of the $88million government truancy fund.

Once it was quite common for parents to be phoned if a child wagged school. Today even the hair salon up the street uses automatic text technology for customer interface. It beggars belief that schools don’t use this bog-basic technology for truancy notifications.

Still, stand by for the idiot who’d bleat that texting parents infringes on children’s privacy.

Truancy is first up an attitude problem. In desperate times we need to reach past department-think and call in the types of private sector skills that governments reflexively ignore. (Think our Covid response.)

The marketing industry, especially its incentives sector, has a brilliant understanding of both teenage and parent minds. We see the surface of this in Fly Buys and cards, in lending incentives, retail two-fors, and in the thought behind salary packages so carefully designed to unlock someone’s potential.

The ministry’s finest anti-truancy programme was actually accidental — it was the by-product of providing free school lunches. The joke is that the same experts who fatten teenagers by incentivising them into KFC and McDonald’s may offer inspired advice on adding a couple of percentage points to teenage school attendance.

You’ve gone mad Uncle Norm? No, I’m deadly serious. Many businesses would mortgage their souls to be allowed to partner in good school programmes.

Consider the parent receiving a terse school text that reads: "Darryl truanted today. Your child pension has automatically lost its $30 good parenting bonus. Two hundred free texts have been deleted from this pupil’s Schoolie Vodafone chip, and Apple Arcade has placed a 30-day block on the Warped Kart Racer game it gifted."

Read that again. None of it is as ridiculous as it sounds. However, Wellington doesn’t think of business creativity as a source of solutions for public policy. Besides, this is 2022. Consequences are unfashionable.


Dear Uncle Norm,

I had to go to Auckland for a big family function. Knowing it would be postponed if some nephew got Covid, I booked online paying Air New Zealand’s very top price to buy a fully refundable return ticket.

Sure enough, Covid struck. I went online to get my refund, only to be notified the sole route to "money back" was telephoning their call centre.

Fat chance! The phones aren’t answered. You’ll spend more time on hold than you’d get for a guilty plea to common assault. Surely it’s fraudulent to offer refunds that aren’t practically claimable!

Is there anything I can do?

Phone Queuer.

Of course, you can do something!

Invest in a telephone headset, then negotiate a week off work. Order in 5kg of Hawaiian pizza, settle back in bed and dial Air New Zealand.

Sorry. But our problems start when we blindly click the "accept terms and conditions" button, rather than spend an hour reading their lawyer bumf.

You’ve possibly also agreed to route your bags via Scott Base and pay $5 to the charity that buys the co-pilot’s Marmite sandwich.

John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer. But Queensland calls. Uncle Norm is wagging his column until September 19.