Truancy puts teenagers out of class

Picture a fourteen-year-old boy, sitting on the steps of a schoolyard and crying.

The boy’s name is Jordan and he is at his first full day of school in three weeks. He has just left a Mathematics class after yelling at his teacher and saying there is no point being there. Inside, his peers are doing work that he does not understand in a setting he can barely control himself.

Most days he rides his bike to school in the morning and then rides away again just an hour or two later. Tomorrow, Jordan is unlikely to show up at all.

For those who work with chronically truant students, stories like this are normal.

Thirty thousand students skip school each day.

In response to these high rates, Education Minister Anne Tolley announced last fortnight that the Government is “getting tough” on truancy by targeting funding to administrative strategies that will make it easier for schools to enrol students and track truancy.

It boils down to three initiatives. One will help schools enrol children quickly; another will help schools identify students who are playing truant before the behaviour becomes habitual; and the final strategy will see schools using technology that sends parents automatic text messages if their children are not at school.

Meanwhile the underlying causes of chronic truancy remain untouched.

Although these measures may be helpful to some, the problems at the heart of chronic truancy are not simply organisational. Many children occasionally wag class in the normal attempt to push boundaries, but chronic truancy has deeper roots.

According an Education Ministry research, truancy was linked to academic failure and poor family functioning.

Relational problems, illiteracy and social dislocation all correlate with truancy.

It is hard to see how the Government’s administrative initiatives can do much for these concerns. The school system as it currently stands misses too many students who, like Jordan, do not fit easily into it.

Just weeks ago, a report looked at ways we could open up our education system to be more creative, more flexible and more responsive to each child’s needs.

It seems to have been virtually ignored. It was a minority report from the Inter-Party Working Group on school choice, titled Free to Learn, littered with recommendations that would give schools, teachers, parents and students the opportunity to direct learning towards the unique needs of unique children.

Schools would have greater flexibility over curriculum delivery and staffing, parents would have more freedom to choose their children’s schools, quality teachers would be given incentives to remain in the classroom and new education providers would be free to open up. For too long, the highly rigid system in New Zealand has pushed creativity and innovation out of education.

 “For 11 years or more, many students experienced large classes, narrow corridors, white boards, set curriculum, sunless testing and, despite our best efforts, regular monotony. It is as if we cannot think of anything better for them ... No wonder 29,000 students each day are truant,” the Ministry Report said.

Ms Tolley’s truancy initiatives are fine as far as they go. They may help schools save time in administration and enable parents keep better track of their children’s attendance. But the tragedy is that by telling ourselves we are “getting tough,” we might accept these measures as solutions for students like Jordan, when more is needed. It gets even worse when the braver, more holistic solutions of Free to Learn, which look at the full package of education and are built on solid international experience, have been tabled and ignored.

Students dropping off the fringe of our education system should attend specialist schools that would motivate them to improve their attendance.

They need teachers who can springboard their interests and provide remedial support in literacy and numeracy to enable them to catch up with their peers. The initiatives recommended in Free to Learn would not guarantee that such schools would open up, but would certainly make it easier for this to happen.

By contrast, to claim that a few administrative changes will fix truancy is to treat the headache and ignore the disease causing it. We can heighten the gates, lock the doors,   break children in like horses and discipline them to stay, but this would not help them either learn or reach their potential. There can be no substantial change unless chronic truants are able to see the benefits of school and are able to grasp some hope that they will be able to catch up and learn.

-Maxim Institute