The latest in print currently (5th December 2010)
To Principals and District Truancy Service Providers
The Minister of Education, Hon Anne Tolley, is pleased to announce that District Truancy Service Agreements will be extended for an additional 12 months to 31 December 2011
Attendance and engagement are important factors in raising student achievement. Overall an educated population will have a significant influence on New Zealand’s future.
Further to this a new attendance and non-enrolment service will be established by 1 January 2012 to provide attendance and non-enrolment services to schools.
The new service will be more comprehensive, pro-active and responsive to the needs of Māori and also Pasifika students. The new service will have better links to other social services and community support.
Pilots will be run with two District Truancy Services in South Auckland and Gisborne through 2011 to derive good practice features of the current service for transfer to the new service.
Findings from these pilots will be shared with all District Truancy Service providers and will inform the new attendance and non-enrolment model.
All existing District Truancy Service providers will be communicated with in the development of the new service. Providers will be kept informed of the timeframe and progress towards the new service to maximise the potential for existing providers to be involved in the new attendance and non-enrolment service from 2012.
We know there has been some uncertainty for DTS providers, so we are pleased to be able to confirm the extension to Agreements. Regional Ministry staff will be contacting you in the coming week.
Regards
Sylvia Beumelburg
Adviser
Education, Curriculum & Performance
Ministry of Education
Private Bag 3012
Wanganui
To Principals and District Truancy Service Providers
The Minister of Education, Hon Anne Tolley, is pleased to announce that District Truancy Service Agreements will be extended for an additional 12 months to 31 December 2011
Attendance and engagement are important factors in raising student achievement. Overall an educated population will have a significant influence on New Zealand’s future.
Further to this a new attendance and non-enrolment service will be established by 1 January 2012 to provide attendance and non-enrolment services to schools.
The new service will be more comprehensive, pro-active and responsive to the needs of Māori and also Pasifika students. The new service will have better links to other social services and community support.
Pilots will be run with two District Truancy Services in South Auckland and Gisborne through 2011 to derive good practice features of the current service for transfer to the new service.
Findings from these pilots will be shared with all District Truancy Service providers and will inform the new attendance and non-enrolment model.
All existing District Truancy Service providers will be communicated with in the development of the new service. Providers will be kept informed of the timeframe and progress towards the new service to maximise the potential for existing providers to be involved in the new attendance and non-enrolment service from 2012.
We know there has been some uncertainty for DTS providers, so we are pleased to be able to confirm the extension to Agreements. Regional Ministry staff will be contacting you in the coming week.
Regards
Sylvia Beumelburg
Adviser
Education, Curriculum & Performance
Ministry of Education
Private Bag 3012
Wanganui
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http://news.google.com/news/more?ned=nz&topic=n&ncl=d9Z0wxHHIcBDEAMre_S0dZj_dRUCM
Wed, 03 Mar 2010 6:48a.m.
News Flash !! November 2010 = http://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/news/4387289/Truancy-officers-wait-for-contracts____________________________________________________ - An education expert believes complacent parents are a main factor in the country's worrying school truancy rates.
- The Government announced yesterday it will pump an extra $4 million a year into curbing the problem, after a new survey revealed over 30,000 primary and secondary kids bunk everyday.
Among those are 2,500 long-term truants who aren't even enrolled at school.
Massey University's Michael Irwin says getting children to school starts at home.
“We have too many children who are sometimes allowed to be truant by their parents and sometimes don’t even tell their parents and go away from school,” he says.
Dr Irwin says a full community effort is required to combat the problem of truancy.
RadioLIVE - Worst truancy rate 03/03/2010
Tairawhiti Truancy Services chairman Owen Lloyd believes the problem will get worse unless community agencies start to work together in a united front.
At the moment, groups such as Strengthening Families, Special Education, Truancy Services and Police Youth Aid were all working with the problem in their own “cells”.
But the Government’s plan to double funding for truancy intervention was a step in the right direction, he said.
He and Kaiti community worker Manu Caddie believe funding should be linked to the decile ratings of schools rather than being population-based.
The Ministry’s survey shows truancy rates are 80 percent higher at decile 1 schools than decile 10 schools, and Maori and Pacific pupils are twice as likely to skip classes.
Under the population- based funding used by the ministry, a school in Invercargill would get as many resources as one in Kaiti, for example.
“They should recognise deprivation indexes,” says Mr Lloyd.
“Waikohu College, for example, has a deprivation index of one and Lytton High School two, and both are hotbeds of truancy,” he said.
At present it was hard to keep on top of it, with only two truancy officers working 30 hours a week to cover the city and rural area.
Funding was only one aspect of the problem.
“The biggest problem we see with the truancy is parents who don’t place a value on education. This is passed on to their kids, who don’t view it as a priority,” said Mr Lloyd.
Government’s plan to send these parents automated text messages or e-mail alerts asking them to explain their child’s absence was unlikely to make a difference.
Some of the home environments involved were challenging, such as those involving gangs or substance abuse.
Tairawhiti Truancy Services was now taking the stance of asking the disinterested parent to get in touch with the school’s truancy officer and social worker, and starting legal proceedings against parents where this was not done.
There was another group of truants for whom school “sucked” — it was not an exciting place to be and they were not engaged in it.
There was no point forcing these kids back into school, because this would result in teachers dealing with someone in the class who did not want to be there, disrupting things for all the other students.
There had to be another approach to re-engage them in education.
Truancy Services were starting to see the problem increasingly creeping into intermediate schools, and were even seeing it at late primary school level, Mr Lloyd said.
“It’s a multi-sided problem,” he said.
Another issue was a lack of understanding some schools had of the role of truancy officers, with some schools viewing them as attendance officers tracking down kids who were bunking for the day.
In fact, these people were dedicated social workers who worked with the families of those who did not attend school at all.
In some cases, there were obvious medical reasons for the child to not attend school. If necessary, pressure could be put on the parents to get them sorted out.
Other cases were more complex and would benefit from close inter-agency work.
Mr Caddie also calls for a more holistic, whanau-based programme. Te Ora Hou in Whangarei had been very successful in re-engaging kids in school and he would like to see a similar programme here, he said.
The same approach was used successfully by Kaiti schools with a six-month pilot project involving KaPai Kaiti.
The reason it worked was that parents were more receptive to approaches by people with local credibility than by officials from schools.
Lytton High School principal and Tairawhiti Area and Secondary School Principals’ Association president Jim Corder also believes there should be some connection between agencies working with similar groups of people.
The definition of truancy needed to be clarified, he said.
The ministry seemed to consider every absence as a truancy.
“The numbers are not big in terms of serious truants. What is big, is the number of students who are skipping the odd day or period. But they are not truants,” he said.
“We believe that schools should not be involved in prosecution. It is the law and we must uphold the law but I don’t believe it’s something we should be involved in.”
There needed to be funding to employ people to do “more thorough” follow-up work.
“The current system, as long it has been in place, has not significantly improved attendance.
“We could put some more people on the ground where there are some serious attendance matters.”
Authors Note: or provide more hours.
