Understanding attendance

Presence and absence: the administrative requirements

A good attendance system needs to be in place to support quality learning. Good attendance systems help create conditions for staff and students to work together effectively. In such a system, simple, clear goals and effective procedures are known and expected by all.

Directions, regulations, and practices for managing student attendance are well-defined and available online.

  • Within the Student Attendance collection, use the Attendance Guidelines for Schools [PDFs located to far right of web page] to give you a clear picture of the legal requirements and Ministry expectations.
  • Keep up to date about attendance regulations with this Electronic Attendance Register page. It provides useful policies and protocols, reports on using electronic registers, and tips about attendance practice. Look at the case studies.
  • From that page, use the downloadable document "Attendance Tips for Best Practice" (Word 236KB) for Ministry suggestions, tips, and protocols.

Things to know

This checklist will help you to ensure you know about and understand attendance processes:

  • the law about attendance (Education Act 1989, sections 20, 25, 29, 31)
  • Ministry of Education attendance regulations
  • board of trustees’ responsibilities regarding attendance
  • procedures for monitoring attendance in place and regularly reviewed
  • attendance expectations and monitoring procedures in written form for students, parents, and caregivers
  • attendance expectations emphasised in teachers’ discussions about student progress
  • the capabilities of electronic attendance registers (eAR).

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Your school: attendance as it is now

Attendance and absence data collection is a daily chore that involves every member of the school community. In schools where the average presence is consistently higher than 90 per cent, attendance checks are easier. Where average presence drops down into the 80–90 per cent range, the daily chore is very demanding in terms of time.

However, as a daily, very familiar, routine, it can lack urgency and importance in the minds of some students and their families.

Principals who develop and use management systems to support and enhance student learning:

  • know about effective management practice and systems, and model consistent use of them
  • prioritise and resources selected areas targeted for improvement
  • use evidence to monitor progress, plan, and manage change
  • delegate the running of systems to appropriate staff
  • establish contingency strategies for when unseen circumstances arise (Kiwi Leadership for Principals, page 19)
  • analyse the attendance data to understand school patterns.

Analysing the data

Who has poor attendance?

Attendance in New Zealand Schools 2009 provides a nationwide picture.

  • Find the data for your school when you log in to SchoolSmart in e-Admin.
  • Using the same criteria and approach required for the Nationwide Attendance Survey, take your in-school attendance data for a representative period this year (say, the month of May) and analyse the attendance patterns for girls, boys, different ethnic groups, different year levels, and Mondays and Fridays.
  • Look beyond averages and medians. Look at the bottom 10 per cent. What is the impact of their poor attendance on their achievement and school achievement?
  • Compare your attendance analysis with the nationwide picture.
  • Identify any issues that need your consideration – for example, in-school variations and truancy.
  • Provide staff and board with regular snapshots of absence issues.
  • What do students think is 'poor attendance'? Is there a need for a change of perspective?
  • Are you satisfied with your school’s absence record and the processes used to implement the collection, analysis, follow-up, and benefits gained from the processes involved?

Who has excellent attendance?

  • Use your attendance data collected (for example, for May). Take the data for those who have excellent attendance and analyse it.
  • Provide a report to the staff and board on those who attend well.
  • What is done about students with very high levels of attendance?
  • Do the characteristics of those students who have excellent attendance provide any understandings that will help raise the levels of attendance of others?
  • What do students think is 'excellent attendance'?

Your school attendance patterns

  • What are the correlations between attendance patterns and student achievement for specific groups?
  • What can you do about altering the present attendance situation?
  • Keep these results readily available to assist school decision making and action.

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Engagement and attendance: beyond data collection

As you work on issues to do with attendance, give thought to these leadership attributes noted in Kiwi Leadership for Principals:

"Principals who focus the school culture on enhancing learning and teaching:

  • build distributed leadership networks that secure commitment and responsibility for continued improvement through all levels of the school
  • challenge and modify values and traditions which are not in students’ best interests." (School Culture in Kiwi Leadership for Principals)

Non-attendance does not go away. Students may leave, but the issue remains visible in school attendance records.

'In-school' or 'school-based' factors offer the best starting points for principals and teachers to apply strategies to reduce non-attendance. Such strategies can be viewed as 'pull factors', working to retain or increase engagement in learning.

Promotion of the school as a supportive and caring place is commonly at the core of strategies to strengthen engagement. The nature of teaching and learning is being included in strategies to reduce absence levels.

Initiatives for non-attendance

Graeme Withers, a senior research fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research, published a paper for the Learning Choice Expo in Sydney in June 2004. In this paper, Section 3 contains initiatives to lessen rates of non-attendance (pp. 21–29) and Section 4 Discussion (pp. 30–34) offers useful comment.

He identifies these common ingredients in strategies used to strengthen engagement with formal education:

  • dynamic classrooms led rather than ruled by teachers
  • classrooms that respond flexibly to students’ stated or perceived needs, rather than a rigid, qualifications-driven process
  • strengthening teachers’ skills with in-service education that enables them to function more professionally for a wider range of student abilities and interests
  • cultural inclusiveness and sensitivity to learning styles, languages and traditions amongst minority ethnic groups
  • changing a school climate to emphasise cooperation and to encourage active learning, to take place in and out of the classroom
  • whole-school commitment to effort in reducing absenteeism and suspensions, involving not only the whole school community, but also its surrounding community
  • provision of options for any suspended students, allowing their learning to proceed
  • smaller schools where values and expectations are shared and clear, both in policies and their enactment
  • a thorough system of pastoral care and counselling that reaches parents as well as students (from Withers G. (2004) Disengagement, Disenchantment, Disappearance. A paper prepared for the Learning Choice Expo conducted by the Dusseldorf Skills Forum, Sydney, 23–24 June).

Examples in New Zealand and other OECD countries that have paid attention to some of Wither’s suggestions include:

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Dealing with poor attendance

Check that your decisions and actions arise from analysis of the school’s attendance data.

Put in place a schoolwide attendance focus

Read the Systems section of Kiwi Leadership for Principals (pages 19–20) to confirm the professional characteristics used as you work on this process.

This principal’s checklist provides a guide for schoolwide attendance as part of your school’s engagement in learning strategy:

  • Our daily recording of attendance provides accurate and timely summaries week in and week out. Reworks to overcome entry errors are rare.
  • In our school, a range of people (class or form teachers, deans, senior staff) use the attendance data as a basis for strengthening student engagement through personalised approaches and systems.
  • Our monitoring of attendance data at least meets the criteria suggested in the Attendance Guidelines (PDF 1MB), page 8.
  • Our parents are regularly informed about their children’s attendance weaknesses and asked to play a key role in rectifying them.
  • There is a schoolwide process for acknowledging excellence in attendance.
  • We apply absence and truancy procedures fully and consistently. We work collaboratively with other schools, the Truancy Service, and other agencies.
  • Recording of attendance and absence is making full or increasing use of computer technology to reduce the dollar and human costs of schoolwide monitoring.
  • At least every 6 months, we reflect on the attendance issues that are of concern to teachers and, where necessary, provide action based on the analysis of data collected from day to day.
  • Our annual reviews of attendance processes use criteria like those from the Attendance Guidelines, page 7.

Use this checklist and the Attendance Guidelines (PDF 1MB) to help you ensure the schoolwide processes are in place and working to improve the levels of engagement.

Probably 70–80 per cent of students will respond satisfactorily and meet the communication demands of such systems. (For example, parents phone in absences.)

Emphasise teachers' responsibility for attendance

  • Reduce in-school variation in attendance: Teachers taking responsibility for the attendance at their class(es) will personalise messages to students about any lack of attendance. Such action is likely to bring improvement when combined with active work on engagement processes to provide "dynamic classrooms led rather than ruled by teachers" (see Withers’ suggestions above).
  • Target: Clearly identify those students who are not meeting school expectations and require teachers to provide a focus on them. Such an approach will bring attendance improvement with another 5–15 per cent of students as they respond to a more personalised education system.

Engage support agencies, counsellors, and other services

Take responsibility for the truants and difficult cases by participating in district support systems. Be able to clearly identify who is in this group.

  • Truancy Service, Group Special Education, social welfare agencies, drug and alcohol counsellors, iwi authorities, and other social services may all play a role in working with the students who have the worst attendance.
  • Develop effective communication systems with these agencies. Ensure that daily information flows are working well, as required.
  • Participate in district truancy initiatives and support any local committee.
  • Recognise that at intermediate and secondary school level, the complexity of working with truants is often beyond the resources of your school alone.
  • Ensure there are means to reintegrate students who have had lengthy absences so the ‘pull factors’ of school can get to work.

Does this guide meet your needs? If not, let us know: contact@educationalleaders.govt.nz

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