By Kitty te Riele, Martin Mills, Deborah Lynch, Emily Rudling. Annemaree Carroll and Anna Sullivan
Students are now back at school for Term 1. Campaigns around attendance by education departments around Australia are reminding students and families ‘every day counts’. And extensive evidence shows being at school supports academic achievement and school completion. It also benefits emotional wellbeing and social connectedness.
But school attendance in Australia is in decline, from nearly 92 per cent in 2018 to just over 88 per cent now. The Productivity Commission and the Australian Education Research Organisation raised concerns about attendance in recent reports.
Non-attendance at school affects some students more than others. For example, students living in contexts of disadvantage rely heavily on education to improve their lives. But they are also more likely to miss out on school compared to more privileged peers. This means school attendance is an equity issue. Making it possible for all students to be at school requires sound data. It also requires commitments from governments and school systems.
Campaigns and reports on this issue are welcome. But we also have concerns.
The voices of students, schools and communities facing entrenched disadvantage are missing. We can’t know what is needed without those voices.
Second, common understandings of attendance are limited. They do not count various ways in which students miss out on school.
We address these concerns below drawing on evidence from our two current Australian Research Council projects:
- Towards a School-Community Based Approach to Addressing Student Absenteeism (Martin, Deborah and Annemaree)
- Fostering school attendance for students in out-of-home-care (Kitty, Emily and Anna)
School leaders in disadvantaged communities
Previous research by some of us on the Every Day Counts initiative in Queensland showed that there are many factors outside of schools which affect student attendance and that schools and communities need to collaborate to find solutions. The first project we draw on builds on those findings, examining school attendance in communities experiencing high poverty.
Principals in this study highlighted that families and carers face intertwining challenges: housing crisis, cost of living crisis, persistent unemployment, intergenerational poverty, and pervasive effects of racism. These structural injustices are often accompanied by emotional stresses on families and students, perpetuated by discourses which hold people responsible for their own marginalisation. Schools too face their own crises – including the dire shortage of teachers and principals. That limits what they can do to support attendance.
A principal from North Queensland captures the exasperation felt by many:
With the housing crisis, we have got a number of families who have some pretty dire living conditions…tents, no running water, cars, multiple families in homes…definitely impacts on coming to school, finding the uniform, washing the uniform…even eating the night before, having a good sleep… What we do need is to look at attendance as a community problem, not a school problem… if we had somehow support for a whole family… us being part of it, but not us running the stakeholders and driving the whole thing – because our resources are so depleted and it’s only getting worse.
Collaborations with community
The research found that collaborations with community to improve attendance included building cooperative relationships with health, justice, and social services. It also included co-ordinating joint programs with community and youth organisations.
Some schools in remote and rural locations partnered with First Nations communities to improve attendance through a variety of practices. These include holistic approaches embodying strong cultural connections to people and place, history, relationships, and local practices.
Such community engagement is exemplified by a rural school principal in North Queensland:
A big program for us…community breakfast club…not just the students…get a meal …parents…Aunties or Uncles can all sit around and eat… we want community to come in and participate and be active in what we’re doing as well…more…parents or Aunties or Uncles…come in… with the Year 7 students who have transitioned. Maybe just look after them or calm their nerves about starting a new school…Elders…even politicians come in… just to get them to the school to say… isn’t this great.
School-community partnerships can drive actions through shared purpose to challenge social arrangements that create inequalities and act as barriers to school attendance. We need a collaborative approach where people in communities (including young people!) feel heard and motivated to work towards common goals.
Students in out of home care
The second project we draw on focuses on attendance for students in out-of-home care. As a group, students in care have significantly more absences from school than their peers not in the child protection system. They are absent for twice as many days per term. They are suspended four times more often than students not in the child protection system.
School processes and behavioural policies are often not designed with these students in mind. When students in care also have a disability and / or identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander they are at even greater risk of suspension and missing out on school. Intersectionality between disability and being in care was mentioned by a foster carer:
The school doesn’t understand the child’s disabilities. Therefore suspension continues to happen. […] Trying to give the school help & support to help them understand children with FASD [Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder] , it’s so hard, understanding that constant suspension doesn’t help. (Foster carer for Year 10 student)
A different story
Education department campaigns focused on improving attendance tend to be directed at students and their parents/carers. But carers and case workers – as with the principals above – tell a different story. Missing out on school tends to be the result of external barriers rather than a choice by the student or their carer.
Some of these ways of missing out on school are not recorded in official data. For example students are marked as attending when they are in class but not participating in class work; are absent for less than two hours in a day; or are on an in-school suspension.
But these experiences still reduce students’ equitable opportunity to engage with learning.
Child likes going to school but due to behaviour often is asked to be picked up early or is not in class so might as well not be attending. (Foster carer for Year 4 student)
Unfortunately, child was allowed to play with iPad in class instead of doing work. […] When it is a long term issue it can become normal. (Foster carer for Year 6 student)
What’s being measured?
Official attendance rate data only measures full-time students. Yet it is quite common for students in care to be placed on a part-time enrolment. Often this is because trauma associated with being in child protection leads to student behaviours that schools find difficult to address.
He is only attending school part time due to behavioural issues. (Kinship carer for Year 2 student).
Similarly, Indigenous students in care have been placed on “reduced hours of schooling in response to their trauma-related behaviours and the inability of schools to work with them”.
When students miss out on school in ways that are not officially counted, the extent of the lack of access to their right to education is hidden and solutions may be misdirected.
What we need next
Reports such as those by the Productivity Commission and AERO help to give an overview of the extent of student absences from school. They also point to challenges and enablers for school attendance.
We need that kind of work. But these do not include the voices of children and young people, their families and carers, and their schools and communities; and they have a limited scope of what they count as absences. As a result, they only tell part of the story.
Our findings demonstrate that challenges to attendance tend to be multifaceted and relate to structural inequities, social crises and experiences of trauma. Being at school is even more important for students facing disadvantage but helping them attend school is not straightforward. Our projects highlight that this requires a deeply inclusive approach based on sound data and through remedies that acknowledge the injustices faced by many communities and those living within them.
Such remedies can only be put in place if there is recognition that schools alone cannot tackle broad issues of social injustice. Moreover, they can only be effective if those most affected feel heard and included in the decision making process.
Acknowledgements
The research informing this blog was partially supported by the Australian Government through two Australian Research Council (ARC) projects.
The ARC Discovery project (DP220101939) team includes authors Prof Martin Mills, Dr Deborah Lynch and Prof Annemaree Carroll; as well as A/Prof Wojtek Tomaszewski, Dr Sasha Lynn, Dr Angelique Howell, Dr Brooklyn Corbett, Matthias Kubler, Chelsey Priddle, and Tarissa Hidajat.
The ARC Linkage Project (LP220100130) team includes authors Prof Kitty te Riele, Dr Emily Rudling and Prof Anna Sullivan; as well as Prof Sharon Bessell, Prof Daryl Higgins, Dr Michael Guerzoni, Dr Cadhla O’Sullivan, and Shelley Stokes. It is also supported by partner organisations: Life Without Barriers; Berry Street Victoria; Stronger Smarter Institute; Commissioner for Children and Young People (Tasmania); Allambi Care; Anglicare NSW South, NSW West & ACT; Anglicare Victoria; Key Assets Australia; and Mackillop Family Services.
The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the ARC.
Kitty te Riele is Professor of Education in the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania. Kitty is on LinkedIn. Martin Mills is a Research Professor at QUT. He researches in the area of social justice and education. Martin is on LinkedIn. Deborah Lynch is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work at The University of Queensland. Emily Rudling is a Research Fellow in the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania. Emily is on LinkedIn. Annemaree Carroll is Professor of Educational Psychology within the School of Education at The University of Queensland. Annemaree is on LinkedIn. Anna Sullivan is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion at the University of South Australia. Anna is on LinkedIn.