The WA Department of Communities Churchill Fellowship to research factors and contexts linked with successful and failing student absenteeism strategies

Australia’s long-term decline in attendance is of increasing concern for educators, researchers and policymakers nationwide. Declines were evident before 2020, and the health and education disruptions of the pandemic exacerbated those declines. In 2022, average absence rates stood at 12.2% for primary students and 15.3% for secondary students, equating to the loss of up to 6 weeks of school in a year. Significantly, around half of Australian students in Years 7–10 and 45% in Years 1–6 missed over 10% of the school year.

This report summarises discussions with professionals from various fields, including education, law, psychology, sociology, history, and social work. These interactions spanned two countries, New Zealand and the United States, and revealed diverse and sometimes contradictory perspectives on the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to school attendance issues, especially in the post-COVID era. The report focuses on collating these findings and translating them into recommendations for the Australian context.

Main Findings

Reasons for lower attendance

With similar declines in attendance evident in both New Zealand and the United States (and elsewhere internationally), I report multiple contributing factors to declining attendance. These include:

• Increased incidence of illness, and increased propensity to stay home when students have minor illness.
• More in-term holidays in 2022 following limited travel in previous years.
• Changed parent and student attitudes and behaviours.
• Concerns about student safety.
• Reduced developmental readiness among young children entering school.
• Decreased student mental health and wellbeing.
• Increased academic pressure to catch up for students who fell behind during COVID.
• Increased school refusal.
• Increased poverty and cost of living pressures.
• Increased teacher workforce pressures.

Recent research from England points to similar issues contributing to reduced attendance.

What doesn’t work

Throughout all conversations, and published research, it was clear that punitive approaches to attendance problems are ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. These approaches are largely based on incorrect assumptions about the reasons underpinning attendance problems, and do nothing to address those reasons.

In many settings, busy schools often follow a ‘wait to fail’ approach, where attendance issues may not be identified until the end of a term, semester, or year, when it is too late to intervene. Schools require more sophisticated data systems to identify at-risk students at an earlier stage, and take a proactive rather than reactive approach to addressing any underlying problems.

Many schools may be trying their best to promote school attendance, for example, using reward systems to encourage attendance for a full week. It is not clear that these interventions address underlying motivation issues long term, and may be counterproductive if they alienate students who cannot attend for reasons outside of their control.

Similarly, with a lack of detailed data or personal information about students, education systems, policy makers, and schools may rely on assumptions about the reasons that students miss school. When these assumptions are incorrect, then the strategies implemented to address the causes of low attendance are destined to fail.

Finally, treating all absences as the same (i.e. equally as harmful to student outcomes) undermines the broader messages parents and students receive about the value of attending school regularly, and does not help schools to target students with a greater need for support. Instead, understanding the ‘functional impact’ of different types of absences helps to target appropriate supports to the right students.

Recommendations

Developing a better understanding of what we’re getting wrong highlights a clear path forward. The following recommendations are underpinned by the need for a change in understanding, language and approach, and where attendance problems are reframed as a symptom of something that may require support, but not the problem itself. In practice, this could involve:

1. Reframing attendance problems: View attendance problems as a symptom of a larger issue(s) rather than the problem itself. A change in legislative language to move away from punitive language (e.g. truancy fines) and towards one of child and adolescent wellbeing, will help to shift policy, and therefore school practice, to ensure responses to attendance problems address the actual reasons for low attendance.
2. Taking a more proactive approach: Implement early warning systems using accurate, actionable data to pre-emptively address absenteeism concerns.
3. Use data-driven methods to identify students most affected by absenteeism and employ other indicators of student outcomes (e.g. achievement and wellbeing metrics) to target student of greatest concern.
4. Multi-tiered support systems: Deploy differentiated evidence-based intervention strategies based on student population needs and continuously evaluate their effectiveness.
5. Access to essential services: Ensure students and their families have affordable and timely access to health, mental health, and social services.
6. This report also advocates for creating an 'Australian Attendance Hub', similar to the United States' Attendance Works, to serve as a free resource for local schools and policymakers, providing relevant data, research, policy context, and tailored consultation services.
7. Finally, this report also highlights the need for a national discussion about education redesign, recognising that traditional schooling does not resonate for a minority of students and that this is likely reflected in declining attendance.

It is clear that Australia needs a new approach for supporting regular school attendance. By changing how we talk about the issue, more effective use of data, identifying appropriate and effective supports that address the root causes, and ensuring students and families have access to the services they need, Australian education systems can reverse the recent declines in attendance.