A focus of my Board report this month is school attendance. Parents and caregivers will be aware this is a national focus too as school attendance stats have been in freefall, actually prior to Covid but certainly during and after as well.
Regular attendance is defined as 90% or one day away from school each fortnight. Nationally the figure for regular attendance sits at 59.7% of the student population. 90% has long been the metric that we measure ourselves on here at Springs/Waiōrea, and I’m proud to say that attendance here is 20 to 30% above the national figure but just a little bit (5%) below our target of 90%.
We all have our part to play here in getting our school attendance up and our monitoring systems at the school inform us of chronic cases in quite a graphic way. Kōrero with parents/whānau will become a persistent feature of our intervention here.
We believe we provide:
- A welcoming environment where students feel safe.
- Engaging learning.
- Teachers who connect with our students.
- Educationally powerful connections with students and parents.
We ask parents, caregivers and whānau to make sure their kids attend every day, and to phone in if there is a reason they are not able to attend on any particular day.
We have ambitious targets and bold actions to get everyone involved in this important initiative to get school attendance front and centre in every one of our families.
What are we doing to address attendance issues?
- Attaching names to the percentages – identifying chronic poor attendees.
- Communicating to parents, caregivers and whānau:
a) When their children are absent, and
b) When they have a more serious attendance problem by inviting them into the school to discuss their child’s attendance pattern.
The strong correlation between attendance and achievement is a key driver of this work too. Non-attending students are non-engaged in the ‘business’ of the school!
Ngā mihi
Ivan Davis
Principal
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