Summary

This paper examines relationships between self-reported truancy and other indicators of student wellbeing, including schoolwork-related anxiety, sense of belonging, exposure to bullying, motivation and experiences of teacher unfairness. The paper uses data from the PISA 2015 survey of 15 year old students. We found that students who report skipping a greater number of school days in the preceding fortnight report worse average outcomes for these measures of wellbeing. However, we also found that attendance by itself is not a strong predictor of other aspects of wellbeing, but neither are the other measures of wellbeing in the report. This suggests that the aspects of wellbeing discussed in this paper operate somewhat independently of one another.

Key findings

The report finds:

• Students appear to accurately report their truancies via the self-reported survey in PISA.
• Skipping a greater number of school days over the preceding fortnight predicts worse average wellbeing outcomes.
• Skipping no days of school over the preceding fortnight is predictive of the best average outcomes for wellbeing.
• Outcomes for New Zealand students in schoolwork-related anxiety, sense of belonging, and exposure to bullying fall well below the OECD average, regardless of the number of school days skipped.
• At the individual student level, there is not a strong correlation between truancies and other measures of wellbeing – there are many ‘outlier’ students.
• The measures of attendance, schoolwork related anxiety, sense of belonging, exposure to bullying, motivation and experiences of teacher unfairness examined here are only weakly related to one another; this suggests that different aspects of student wellbeing operate somewhat independently of one another.