Attendance in New Zealand Schools in 2009

Introduction

Participating in education is fundamental to student achievement. The Education Act 1989 requires that parents enrol their children at school and ensure they attend school whenever it is open for instruction unless there is a good reason for them to be absent.

Every day a student is not at school is a day they are not learning. Over time, patterns of non-attendance can place students at risk of poor achievement and early drop-out, thus compromising their later outcomes in life across a range of social and economic measures.

The Ministry of Education continues to actively promote student engagement in education through a multi-year programme of work called the Student Engagement Initiative, which aims to decrease suspensions, exclusions and early-leaving rates and to increase school attendance.

This survey on attendance was carried out in June 2009. The survey aims to inform the Ministry’s work to improve student engagement in education.

Research Aims and Methodology

The attendance 2009 survey gathered data on student attendance during the week of 8-12 June 2009. The research aimed to investigate the relationships between absence and school level factors (e.g. school type, region, decile) and by student factors (e.g. gender, ethnicity, year level of the student).

A sample of 768 schools was selected to represent the 2478 state and state integrated schools in New Zealand. All state and state integrated schools were invited to participate in the previous national surveys in 1998, 2002, 2004 and 2006.

The schools were chosen randomly from sub-groups of schools. The sub-groups were defined using school type and decile as stratifying variables to ensure a representative sample was achieved for measuring both the national attendance and the variation in attendance by school-based variables.

Two forms of data collection were used. Schools who use a module in their Student Management Systems (SMS) to enter their attendance records electronically were asked to provide an extract from the electronic Attendance Register (eAR). Schools that do not use eAR were invited to take part in the paper version of the survey.

The schools recording absence on the paper form were required to make their own judgement of whether a student who is absent for all or part of a day is absent for all or part of a day based on the definitions and instructions supplied. The Ministry of Education applied the business rules supplied to schools in the instructions for the paper survey and to the SMS vendors to define the type and duration of students’ absences from the classroom and school based activities from the eAR data.

The types of absences counted include: justified absences (JA), unjustified absences (UA), and intermittent unjustified absences (IUA) (see definitions below). Total unjustified absence is the sum of unjustified absences and intermittent unjustified absences (UA+IUA). The overall absence rate is the sum of the three absence types (JA+UA+IUA). For each student, the day and type of absence, and the year level, gender and ethnicity of the absent student were collected.

The rate for each absence type is calculated based on the total school rolls for the participating schools and relate to an average (mean) daily absence for the week per 100 students. It should be noted that this does not tell us whether it is the same students that are absent, or whether different students are involved each day.

Definitions of attendance