Hon Minister Seymour
Associate Minister of Education

Associate Education Minister David Seymour has today announced that the new daily attendance dashboard is now live.

“The attendance dashboard will facilitate the daily recording and publication of student attendance,” says Mr Seymour.

“This is an example of Phase 2 of the government’s Attendance Action Plan to ensure that schools, the Ministry of Education, wider government, family, and caregivers are doing everything they can to get students back to school.

“The attendance dashboard will provide New Zealanders with up-to-date data about attendance in state and state-integrated schools across the country. That data will enable us to monitor truancy patterns, raise awareness and understanding of truancy and associated problems, and support effective interventions.

“On January 27 I announced that schools were required to record attendance daily for publication when the dashboard goes live. Today that data is available on the dashboard.

The interactive dashboard will show how many students were at school on any given day with data being published the day after attendance was recorded. The data will include a breakdown of reasons students were not attending school.

Visitors can filter the total number of students by region, type of school and Schooling Equity Index group (this measure has replaced deciles for schools), or day, to understand shifts in attendance over time.

“This will not create extra work for schools as daily recording of student attendance is already a requirement when a school is open for instruction, the Government is now compiling the data and making it readily available,” says Mr Seymour.

“To support schools to provide more accurate data we have also reviewed and reduced the number of attendance codes that schools need to use when recording attendance, from 26 to 15.

“This government is working hard to reach our student attendance target of 80 per cent of students being present for more than 90 per cent of the term by 2030. Tracking attendance daily through the attendance dashboard is integral to achieving this target.

“With more reliable and timely data being made available, the next phase of improving student attendance will be further understanding why students don’t attend.

“If this issue isn’t addressed there will be an 80-year long shadow of people who missed out on education when they were young, are less able to work, less able to participate in society, more likely to be on benefits. That's how serious this is.”

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