Understanding School Attendance: Challenges and Solutions

Research shows a strong link between low school attendance, and achievement, wellbeing, and school completion rates. For many students, missing school can affect their future choices and options.

The factors contributing to school absences are complex and varied, which is one of the main challenges to addressing it.

COVID and flu seasons have seen more students experiencing illness, and young people are also more likely to stay home now when they have a minor illness.

Student mental health and wellbeing are also factors which can influence whether a child attends school.

Research suggests more parents have concerns about their child’s wellbeing at school, or have changed their perceptions about the value of attending school every day following COVID shutdowns.

Increased cost of living pressures have added significant barriers to students attending school for some families, particularly those who have had to move to more affordable areas, and face either longer travel times to school, or need to change schools entirely.

Teacher shortages are also likely to be a contributor. Frequent turnover in teachers can make it difficult to establish and maintain critical student-teacher relationships, without which, a student can be less inclined to attend school.

The key to stopping declining school attendance is to recognise that school absence is a symptom of a larger issue, rather than the problem itself.

Using approaches that focus on underlying issues will see attendance improve.

•    Change the language

A good place to start is changing the language around attendance. Rather than discussion of, for example, truancy fines, reframing attendance as a child and adolescent wellbeing concern shifts the conversation towards focusing on the factors that result in lower attendance, and concentrating on the ways that students might be better supported to attend school.

In the United States where falling school attendance is also a major concern, the state of Illinois recently made this reframing change and, as a result, schools are changing how they think about, and address, the issue.

•    Catch falling attendance early

Attendance problems often go unidentified at busy schools until the end of term, by which time the problem is much bigger than if schools had the capacity to be more proactive earlier on.

Implementing early warning systems with accurate, actionable data, alongside an appropriate response by schools and the systems that support them, would help to prevent short-term concerns becoming long-term problems.

There is a strong argument for the establishment of an Australian Attendance Hub – similar to that operating in the US – serving as a free resource for schools and policy makers, to provide data, research, policy and tailored consultancy services. This would support schools to better respond to their own contexts and attendance data.

•    Set up accessible support services

Most importantly, when issues are identified, students and families must have easier access to affordable and timely health, mental health and support services.