The last day of Term Two has the worst attendance records - more than 20,000 students were missing on the last Friday of school. Photo: RNZ
Hundreds of thousands of students are skipping out on school early, as school attendance rates drop sharply in the days leading up to school holidays.
It is thought cheaper airfares and accommodation are driving parents to let their children play truant.
The steepest drop could be seen occurring on the Friday before the end of term, however the decline is also significant on the Thursday before the school holidays.
The last day of Term Two has the worst attendance records, more than 200,000 students missing on the last Friday of school nationwide.
In Auckland, where the median house hold income is highest, student attendance plunged to 70 percent the day before the term two break.
It sat around 86 percent on the last ordinary Friday before that.
The data shows attendance on the last couple of days of each term is lowest in the lower-income regions, but tracks up mostly in line with income.
Except for Auckland and sometimes Wellington, the two wealthiest regions, where attendance falls off unexpectedly steeply at the end of term
An Education Review office report released this week showed overall attendance was improving and now back to pre-covid levels.
However, nearly half of parents surveyed were still fine about taking their kids out of school for a family holiday.
The government's target is to have 80 percent of students in class 90 percent of the time by 2030.
Headmaster of St Peters College in Auckland, James Bentley told Checkpoint truancy was a growing problem in his school, and he was doubtful the government's target would be achievable.
"It's going to be very, very difficult to get to their target because even 80 percent is is something like 10 or 12 days off a year, so that is still a significant amount of time away from school."
Bentley said students at his school were often being taken out of class for much longer than one or two days.
"Sometimes a week, sometimes two weeks, sometimes it could even be three weeks before the end of the term.
"You have a lot of families who want to go away over the holidays, it's far more expensive to go once the fees go up, accommodation prices go up, so they're choosing to go before, and head away before the end of the term.
"Unfortunately it's becoming a real problem."
He said the issue was widespread across most schools.
"It's becoming quite common for some parents to say, look we want to take our teenagers across to Europe to see the sights or visit family.
"Some families have family weddings which they have no control over the timings. Sometimes it's slap bang in the middle of the term and they think, well, why don't we put a holiday around this... while education for them is very important, they'll park it when it when it comes down to a holiday like this."
Bentley said at his school parents were usually honest about the reason for taking their child out of school, but this came down to the school's hard line policy on truancy.
"We say it's unacceptable and we certainly won't be approving this leave. It depends on the age, you know, some of the students can be younger, but certainly once they get into the senior levels, it's just totally unacceptable to be taking students out of school time when they've got assessments, exams."
He said some schools had gone as far as putting assessments in the last week of school to force parents to reconsider skipping out early.
While St Peters would mark the students as an unjustified absence, Bentley said schools don't hold much power, and parents often still go.
"While the ministry looks like they're trying to make some sort of interventions here, at the moment there's not not a lot we really can do."
Bentley said it was time to come up with some sort of plan to address the issue.
"We've got real issues since the pandemic it's been really difficult to get students back to school. It became too easy not to be in school. Some families decided it was too easy not to have to send their child to school and they got used to it.
"If you're not in school, you're not in school, and whether you're in Europe or you're at home, you need to be at school, and it's really important that we get that message out."
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