Lifting student attendance, as well as understanding the drivers for non-attendance through data, are government priorities for improving student achievement. In April 2024, a new attendance action plan was introduced which speaks to this priority.
Early estimates from the Ministry of Education show that 65.9% of students regularly attended school in Term 1 of 2025, which is slightly up from 61.4% in 2024 and 59% in 2023 (but still slightly lower than 73.1% in 2019 and 67.9% in 2020). The real challenge now, in my view, is whether and how schools will develop their own plans to drive consistent improvements to attendance. To a school, what would a theory of improved attendance look like? What would it take to see the above estimates rise well above 80%?
Given the action plan recently celebrated its first-year anniversary, I wanted to make three observations that I think would help our collective thinking around lifting attendance and ultimately improving school environments. My underlying argument across the three observations is that attendance should be seen as an outcome of schooling efforts that are contingent on addressing barriers and challenges to school engagement, as well as ongoing investment in teaching and learning.
Observation 1: Attendance is antecedent to achievement, but mediated by school engagement
It is safe to argue that most of us agree that regular attendance is a good thing, with ample research revealing strong links between attendance, engagement, and achievement. For an excellent collection of contemporary research on student engagement, Springer’s handbook is a must-read.
One meta-analysis suggested that attendance is one of the strongest predictors of achievement, along with quality teaching, particularly for upper secondary and tertiary students (e.g., Crede et al., 2010). But, as this and other meta-analyses have noted, increased student attendance must be coupled with positive schooling experiences (e.g., positive student-teacher relationships, mastery learning experiences, personal and academic support, quality instruction and feedback, engaging and relevant content, and a clear sense of personal and academic talent development). Otherwise, attendance is likely to return to baseline, as students begin to lose sight of the purpose and value of school. Indeed, attendance is more than just presence. It follows that lifting attendance must include ongoing investments in to teaching and learning.
The associations between positive school climates and student attendance are also well-documented in the literature. Going back to this 1989 paper, the authors found statistically significant positive associations between how students perceived their school environments, their achievement and attendance rates. Similar findings have been reported in studies across contexts and cultures. A 2019 meta-analysis had found that the strongest predictor of absenteeism was holding negative attitudes towards school, and the strongest predictors of fully dropping out of school included experiencing learning difficulties and ongoing low achievement.
In other words, we must look at attendance in relation to the context in which students learn and receive support. Fortunately, the research indicates factors that schools and policymakers can focus on to support learners to feel more engaged and supported, and to address issues that contribute to disengagement and negative attitudes towards school.
When students find school to be this amazing cocoon of life-changing opportunities; a place in which they feel seen, supported, challenged, and cared for; then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they give that school their best effort and want to come back again for more. What follows from that scenario is intuitive: increased attendance, ongoing engagement, greater self-discipline and persistence when faced with challenging tasks, and higher self-expectations and academic efficacy. Who wouldn’t achieve highly under such conditions?
Observation 2: the conversation around increasing attendance is not the same as the conversation around reducing non-attendance
The attendance action plan focuses on ‘lifting attendance’ through ‘reducing non-attendance’. Unintentionally, this phrasing could imply that we are dealing with one continuum with attendance and non-attendance on either end (i.e., if we solve truancy, then we solve attendance). But what we now know from the literature is that factors predicting regular attendance are not necessarily the same as those predicting regular non-attendance.
A systematic review (Banerjee, 2016) identified out-of-school factors like poverty and transport as consistently linked with truancy, whereas teacher connectedness and support (as components of quality teaching) were amongst the strongest in-school predictors of attendance. The same study had argued that joined-up effort is therefore necessary to remove external barriers or hurdles that stop students from experiencing said in-school factors and ultimately succeeding.
In other words, we are potentially dealing with two continuums: an attendance continuum that’s typically driven by in-school factors to do with systems, processes, and practices that staff and students can influence, and a non-attendance/truancy continuum that’s typically driven by out-of-school factors to do with the exo- and macro- worlds of the child (see also Gubbels et al., 2019).
In my experience working with schools, I am often told of difficulties dealing with students on the truancy continuum, not the attendance continuum. This is not surprising, given those out-of-school factors (like poverty) aren’t typically within the realm of school responsibilities or part of their core business. Whereas a focus on attendance and addressing in-school influences is both feasible and encouraged through professional learning and development opportunities.
What the above tells us is that solutions could differ in terms of efficacy and effectiveness depending on whether we are wanting to lift attendance or reduce truancy. Schools need to be careful about what it is they are trying to address, to ensure that their efforts and resources are mobilised strategically in line with their intent. Regardless, concerted efforts are necessary to both lifting attendance and eliminating chronic truancy from our schools.
It is worth noting that short-term, single-focused interventions may prove difficult in shifting student outcomes. Although one meta-analysis found moderate-to-large effects of interventions on student attendance, most studies used in that meta-analysis did not manage to improve attendance to acceptable levels (i.e., attendance improved from ‘very bad’ to ‘bad’, rather than from ‘very bad’ to ‘very good’). Notably also, studies used in the above meta-analysis focused mostly on changing student behaviour and not teachers’ instruction or school-wide practices. Overall, truancy-related intervention studies in the literature seem to focus on changing the behaviours or practices of students and/or their families. I wonder whether these interventions would prove more fruitful if aimed at lifting the quality of leadership, teaching, and learning in those schools as well.
Observation 3: The trick to improving attendance is in asking the ‘right’ questions of the data – less about the problem, and more about the solution
In making this observation, I am reminded of a colleague who suggested that we look to other jurisdictions to see how they have mandated attendance and guided schools in addressing non-attendance.
While there are merits to looking overseas for solutions to our local issues, we run the risk of wasting our resources over importing rigid solutions that aren’t fit for purpose, thereby creating more problems in the long run for us to address. I suggest that schools look nationally and internationally for broad strategies and principles to adapt and contextualise, not exemplars and fixed practices to adopt and roll out.
A healthy alternative is to consider whether we are asking the right questions in our teams, and whether our own data can point to solutions that are context specific, useful, and enduring.
Attendance data is useful to describe the status quo, and enable answering “what’s happening?” type of questions; What is the overall attendance picture in our school? how often do students attend? Which groups of students are likely to skip school? At what points in the year do we see dips in attendance data? However, the same data is unlikely to tell us about solutions, strategies, and approaches to turn negative statistics around. We haven’t designed attendance data to capture solutions in the first place, only information about the problem.
Arguably, schools’ ability to lift attendance is only as good as the evidence in hand that informs their thinking and decision-making.
It is pertinent for system stewards, researchers and policymakers to support schools in capturing data that not only tells them what needs changing, but also how it needs changing. Having worked with school-based data for years, I think it is timely to promote capturing data that I describe as:
- Future-focused – allowing leaders to agree on the desired outcomes and where they collectively want to be
- Solution-driven – enabling useful solutions and actionable next steps to be identified
- Strengths-based – pointing to key areas of strengths that schools could build on
- Insightful – not repeating what schools already know lots about
- Reliable – easily repeated over time and across contexts
- Evidenced-based – driven by sound theory and evidence, establishing credibility and validity
- Reflective – allowing leaders to reflect on the extent to which their school efforts and reforms are leading to improvements as intended.
Concluding thoughts
Too often, school interventions and improvement efforts overlook the power of transforming school practices and system-level supports to lift student outcomes. And yet I believe the key to accelerating change in attendance depends on such transformation.
The above observations offer an alternative way of thinking about attendance: not an input to scrutinise, but a result or outcome of schooling efforts. In doing so, we can position attendance as a product of deliberate improvement attempts that are well resourced, well measured, and well evaluated. Ongoing and joined-up support is needed for schools, as they craft and enact their plans to lifting attendance and reducing truancy, as they use ‘good’ data to inform their thinking, and as they fine-tune their practice and establish positive increments towards the ideal: quality school environments where students participate, learn, and flourish. What would it take for kids to go home and tell their parents “I love school!” and eloquently attribute such sentiment to what they experience at school?
It is my hope that researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike think carefully about the issues we are trying to address in our education system, and what the exact roots of the problem are. While I don’t see us in a ‘truancy crisis’ per se, I do think we are navigating a ‘school engagement crisis’ where our assumptions about ‘good’ schooling, leadership, and teaching are being challenged by a new generation of students and families who seek a different model of teaching and learning.
Let’s not only investigate why students aren’t attending. Let’s also ask what it would take for all students to love coming to school regularly. This starts with developing policies and strategies to ensure our school environments continue to be engaging, exciting, and excellent at lifting the education outcomes of all learners. Otherwise, we may be reacting to the symptoms of an issue, but not responding to its cause.
About the author
Dr Mohamed Alansari is a senior researcher at NZCER, whose research focuses on the psychology of classrooms, and the practices (school-wide and in-class) that impact the social and academic trajectories of student learning. He recently led NZCER’s National Survey of Schools project and had previously led major projects focused on school environments and improvement. Mohamed is experienced in designing exploratory and longitudinal studies in the schooling sector to better understand student journeys over time.