Kerre Woodham: Our education system gets an F for Failure

Today, Jan Tinetti, the Associate Education Minister, is launching a nationwide school attendance campaign. 

It's called Every School Day Is A Big Day. School attendance has been a long-term challenge, declining across the board since 2015, and that trend was of course further accelerated by Covid-19. Only two in five kids attend regularly. 40 percent.

Even more of a concern is that only 5 percent of Kiwis consider attendance a top of mind issue. 5 percent. 

Tinetti says she launched the attendance and engagement strategy in June of this year, which set some tough targets, and she wants to see the number of kids attending school regularly increase from 59.7 percent in 2021 to 70 percent in 2024, 75 percent in 2026.

It’s going to be complicated; it is going to be tough because there are a number of issues at play here.

We have poverty and we have housing insecurity, which makes it difficult to get kids to attend school regularly. 

We've had Covid and the school closures; the online learning has meant kids have got out of the habit of attending school. 

Parents have got out of the habit of getting them up, dressed and ready to go. Some children are anxious about going back to school because of the climate of fear that surrounded Covid. 

There's bullying. You're not going to want to go to school if your life is going to be made misery and hell. 

Can we all have a show of hands of how many think that this education system as it stands now is failing our children? 

They have been let down by so many decisions made over the last couple of years. We need to give them better. They deserve better.

Right now, any child that succeeds at school and comes out with incredible qualifications and is ready to face the world is the outlier, they are the exception, not the rule.

Every child deserves to have a decent education and we are failing. We give ourselves an ‘F’ for failure, because that’s what we're delivering.  

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