February 21, 2023 12:55pm by Alwyn Poole

Further to School Attendance

One graph tells a major story.

Labour have worked hard to say that attendance started declining in 2015 and therefore National is to blame. That is – by and large – a myth.

Labour – under former Minister if Education Hipkins – have driven this off a cliff.

Jan Tinetti was unbelievably poor on the AM show this morning. She did a Sgt Shultz impression for some of it.

– She admitted she had the attendance Term 3 attendance data by Dec 22. There have been many OIA requests for it – all denied.

– She says she is not responsible for releasing it but then says it would have been cynical to release near Christmas.

– She doesn’t see it as cynical to have the data released later today after releasing a new policy at 5am this morning.

– We have 120,000 chronically absent, over 10,000 enrolled nowhere, she says average full attendance up to 46% – but their main policy is 84 more truancy officers. Nothing about improving schools, improving teaching standards.

When high decile State school students (low Equity Index Number in the new parlance) are not seeing the point of going to school as they are finding more efficient ways of learning – the system is shot. This is the best illustration of how Labour are going about it.