Summary

Schools are required to report to the Ministry of Education on any disciplinary action taken that as a consequence, denies a student access to school.  The statistics in this report are from that data reported by state or state-integrated schools during the 2007 calendar year.

Schools provide a wide range of responses to breaches of school rules and only those that result in a student being denied access to school are reported here.  This report therefore is on school actions and not on the prevalence of any form of student behaviour.
Stand-downs are a form of timeout actively managed by the principal to ensure behavioural issues are addressed with minimum disruption to a student's learning.  It is preferable that schools use stand-downs instead of suspensions to manage challenging behaviour by students.

Suspension, which is managed by the board, is for the most serious of issues, and has a broader range of consequences.  A suspension can have significant impact on a student's learning and should be avoided if at all possible.

Stand-downs and suspensions are reported separately and are not combined for reporting purposes as they are separate processes with significantly different consequences.

Schools should use the information in this report as a basis for reviewing their own levels of student engagement.

The report is focussed on the number of stand-down and suspension events, rather than the number of students involved.

The report uses 'rate per 1,000 students' to present or discuss changes over time.  The rate per 1,000 is calculated by dividing the number of events by the total number of students enrolled and then multiplying by 1,000.  Rate per 1,000 provides a consistent measure and allows for comparisons over time.

For stand-down and suspensions figures, NZAID students (foreign students sponsored by the New Zealand Agency for International Development - a branch of MFAT), foreign fee-paying students, correspondence school students, adult students (age>19), and private students are excluded.

Early Leaving Exemptions also exclude NZAID students and foreign fee paying students, but include correspondence school students and private school students.  Only students who are 15 years of age are included in the Early Leaving Exemption rate.

For both measures, ethnicity is prioritised in the order of Maori, Pasifika, Asian, other groups except European/Pākehā. European/Pākehā refers to people who affiliate as New Zealand European, Other European or European (not further defined).  For example, this includes and is not limited to people who consider themselves as Australian (excluding Australian Aborigines), British and Irish, American, Spanish, and Ukrainian.  Note that 'Other' ethnic group is not shown on graphs in this report that break down by ethnicity due to the small number of students involved. However, students of 'Other' ethnicity are included in all totals.

Suspension and stand-down rates are also age standardised. As shown in Figure 2 and Figure 6 in this report, the rates of stand-downs and suspensions are highest for ages 13 to 15.  Stand-down or suspension rates will therefore vary from group to group depending on the distribution of the ages of their students, i.e. the more 14 year-olds a particular group has, the higher their stand-down or suspension rate is likely to be. Age standardisation allows for more accurate comparisons between groups with varying age distributions by modifying the rates of groups to reflect what the rates would be if the age distribution of the groups matched the national age distribution.

Engagement and the student population

In 2007 there were 729,168 students enrolled in New Zealand state and state-integrated schools with a further 30,738 students at private schools.  The total number of students at school peaked in 2004.  The number of 14 year olds (the age at which students are most commonly suspended or stood down) peaked in 2005. During the period 2000-2007 the number of Maori, Pasifika, Asian and Other ethnicity students increased by 12%, 24%, 47% and 87% respectively, while the number of  European/Pākehā students decreased by 8%.

Figure 1: Percentage of students at state and state integrated schools by ethnicity, as at 1st July 2007