Kerre Woodham: Our Low School Attendance Is A Disgrace

Showing up. Turning up when you're supposed to. That leads me neatly to the Prime Minister's comments yesterday when he visited Browns Bay School. 

He said parents need to wake up and be a part of solving the problem of low school attendance. He said wake up, talk to your kids and get them to school. And I'm not going to argue that parents need to take a whole lot more responsibility when it comes to doing the right thing by their children. 

Feed them for one, decent food. Read to them. Books are free from the library,buses are cheap to get to your local library. Love them. Give them boundaries. And ensure they understand that there are expectations upon them. And one of those is going to school, especially if you come from a family that's doing it tough.

There is all sorts of help, all sorts of assistance for those parents who are doing it tough. I understand it makes it even more difficult if you're not in one permanent home. If you are constantly moving, having to shift because you've got no place to call your own, that makes it even more difficult, but it also makes it even more imperative that you give your children the skills they need to get out of that. 

You don't want them to live like this. You don't want them to have itinerant lifestyles. You want them to have choices and one way of them having choices is getting them educated.

I'm absolutely passionate about that. Our low school attendance is a disgrace. Taxpayer funded lunches in schools haven't helped. So after Labour dipped into the Covid emergency fund, now National has committed to it and is going to have to find $330 million per year out of taxes as we don't have the slush fund anymore. All well and good.

 You know, they seem to help in some schools and others they don't. I'd like to see the problem of the wastage fixed up so that those who need the food are getting it, so that it's not going to happy pigs. That it's not being redistributed to all and sundry and that it's going to hungry kids. That's what it's there for.

Certainly hasn't helped with the school attendance, which I thought would happen and which was one of the reasons why free school lunches were promoted, that it would improve school attendance – it hasn't. Free sanitary products hasn't got the girls skipping through the gates either.

I agree with the Prime Minister that parents need to wake up, talk to their children and get them to school. But what do you do when your kids won't go?

 We had a caller last year who had a teenage son who was twice her height and he wouldn't go to school. He did the work at home and then he gamed and then he caught up with friends who also weren't going to school. And she remonstrated with him and said, you need to go to school. He said no, I don't. 

I've been told for the last two years that I don't need to go to school, that I can do my learning from home, and in fact it's more efficient for me to do it at home.

I can get the work done in a third of the time and then the rest of the time is my own. So he was still actually doing the work, but he wasn't going to school. And she couldn't make him. She couldn't drag him out of bed. She couldn't pick him up and carry him into school. So that was one clever kid who was doing the work but on his terms and as he saw it, perfectly entitled to work from home because they had been bashed into him for two years over Covid. 

It's exactly what so many educators and people who are passionate about learning feared when schools were closed for Covid and for rain and then more rain. The children couldn't help but see that going to school is not a priority, not a priority to the authorities.

I think it's only Auckland Grammar that sees it as a priority and they get absolutely excoriated in the social media. The MoE in its briefing paper to incoming Minister Erika Stanford, said post Covid there are high levels of disassociation from school and early learning, challenging behavior and a marked increase in anxiety, as well as more severe mental health trauma for young people.

So you've got also parents who are driving their kids to school, and these are young teenagers and their children have a major meltdown. They can't face going into school. They're so anxious after being away from groups of people. So all very well and good and I tend to agree with Christopher Luxon that parents need to take more responsibility. Absolutely. 

You can't outsource raising your children to teachers and to truant officers and to taxpayers who will feed them and caring teachers who will love them. You've got to take responsibility for your kids, but you have to understand that parents are dealing with our whole lot in the wake of Covid. And that the kids who were told going to an actual school is not a priority, have taken that message on and they're running with it.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.