Lubeck MarjaSPECIAL DEBATEInquiry into school attendance—Report of the Education and Workforce CommitteeMARJA LUBECK (Labour): I move That the House take note of the report of the Education and Workforce Committee on the inquiry into school attendance.Talofa Mr Speaker. I'm pleased to kick off the debate on the report of the Education and Workforce Committee on the inquiry into school attendance. This was a robust and constructive inquiry and as chair of the select committee I'd like to begin by thanking all the submitters who took time to write or present to us officials of the Office of the Clerk and Ministry of Education and my colleagues on the select committee for their contributions in the sphere of this inquiry was handled in.I will start with how and why this inquiry started. As we noted in the introduction of our report regular school attendance is the foundation of student achievement and it will be no surprise that research undertaken by the Ministry of Education has found a direct relationship between attendance and achievement. However there has been an increase in chronically absent students since 2015 and it has doubled to 9 percent between 2016 and 2022. Longstanding challenges with regard to attendance rates have been further impacted by the two years of battling with a global pandemic COVID-19. Forty percent of students with reduced attendance did not have concerning attendance patterns at the beginning of 2020 prior to COVID-19. As I mentioned in my annual review debate contribution for the education portfolio last year the Minister has noted his concern with school-attendance rates with the select committee in the past particularly during the 2020 lockdown. During the annual review process the Minister took the committee through the Government's priority to set up a means of measuring and managing the speed at which attendance rates improved post lockdown. And I would like to thank the Minister for engaging with the committee discussing what could be done to improve the attendance of schools and kura. Off the back of this we initiated an inquiry into school attendance on 7 July 2021. We drafted terms of reference seeking to understand the long-term trends and factors that have impacted school attendance and that is why we looked at the 20-year period. Within this however we were also interested in the changes made in 2013 to the ministry-funded Attendance Service and the impacts this has had on attendance and engagement outcomes. We wanted to hear directly from schools and other stakeholders to ensure we understood this as best as we could. Through this inquiry we planned to identify examples of effective practice within schools and kura and other parties where relevant that have led to strong trends in attendance and engagement in schooling. This would allow us to identify potential strategies that could be implemented to increase attendance and inform the Government's attendance strategy. When submissions closed on 30 September 2021 we had received 133 submissions representing a range of perspectives and interests. They included students parents teachers families of disabled or neurodiverse children iwi Attendance Service providers and non-governmental organisations. We also had 55 oral submissions—six of which were specifically invited due to their success or experience in high levels of school attendance. In addition we also conducted a survey using the New Zealand Parliament Instagram account. The report on the review of the Standing Orders in 2020 recommended select committees use alternative forms of public engagement to make sure that we reach a wider range of New Zealanders. This being an inquiry into school attendance it was very important that we heard from our rangatahi. So through the survey on Instagram we reached those students who otherwise may not have been able to make a submission. We received 49 responses to that particular survey and I want to thank the Parliamentary Engagement team for their close work with us on this particular piece of work.The ministry presented their final departmental report to us on 15 December 2021. I want to thank the ministry for their support and advice because they provided that important context that the submitters' experiences were occurring within and also the work that was already under way. From the figures we were presented with it was clear that attendance rates held largely steady from 2011 to 2015 before they started to decline. The decline can be seen across all ethnicities. However it's greater for Māori and Pacific students and is most heavily felt in our lower-decile schools. We said in our report that while societal causes for non-attendance cannot be solved by the education sector alone it's worth discussing what the sector can do and what they are already doing. So our report recommended the continuation of the Ka Ora Ka Ako/Healthy School Lunches Programme—something that Ngāpuhi iwi social services mentioned was a contributing factor to seeing returns to school. Boyd Swinburn professor at the University of Auckland was in full support of the programme calling it the biggest child-nutrition intervention by far in decades. In regard to the in-school causes of declining attendance we heard submitters that pointed to the importance of providing safe and inclusive learning environments. Nearly one quarter of the submissions commented that schools are not inclusive nor welcoming environments. We heard about how students can feel unsafe alienated and as if they don't belong—stemming from racism bigotry bullying academic streaming and cultural competence. I want to make a special mention of the following year 13 students: Sean Brownlow student at Takapuna Grammar School; Silas Zhang head student at Riccarton High School; Ashleigh Putt-Fallows Southland Girls' High School Invercargill; and fa'afetai to Iszak Tuala year 13 student in Christchurch. It was great that we have these student voices amongst the 55 oral submissions that our select committee heard. They spoke to us about the importance of manaakitanga and of taking the holistic approach to issues of school attendance and the need for complex and nuanced approaches to address these—with ākonga at the centre of that solution. These young submitters clearly understood that the underlying causes of non-attendance are complex and that there's not an easy fix. To quote our report Every part of the education system has a role to play in ensuring students feel safe and included at school. We acknowledge that schools have different approaches to achieving this but we also recommend that the Government continue to engage with schools on the importance of the national education and learning priorities that they support the Te Mahau to continue to facilitate local solutions to non-attendance and that the Ministry of Education develops a communications plan about the importance of regular school attendance targeted at families and communities." To address regular-attendance decline amongst Māori students we supported uniquely Māori solutions for Māori students including the further support and funding of Māori-medium schools mixed-medium schools iwi organisations and Māori Attendance Service providers. Submitters told us of the importance of tino rangatiratanga and Māori-Crown partnerships and that the factors identified to impact attendance have led to Māori disproportionately suffering.We had many other recommendations to make from early intervention policies led by Te Mahau to prevent students from becoming chronically absent to the idea that any redesign of the Attendance Service should aim to improve its relationship with those providing early intervention. We heard from submitters holding a range of views on the Attendance Service and we heard from some that the changes made in 2013 for efficiency reasons took the service out of local community hands—with one submitter describing this process as a restructuring being an outsider solution to a complex inside-the-community problem. On the topics of what accountability measures and sanctions are used in other countries the evidence provided through the committee concluded that punitive measures are proven to be ineffective in improving students' attendance problems. Punitive measures do not address the underlying drivers of poor performance especially for those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. We recognise that where some students would attend school regularly there are barriers due to disability and neurodiversity. We recommended that the ministry in conjunction with the new Ministry of Disabled People establish a mechanism for monitoring the number of students who do not regularly attend school full time because of their learning-support needs. We also recommended to make increasing school attendance a focus of the highest-needs review. In total then our report makes 22 recommendations and the Government response is due on 9 June. Our Education and Workforce Committee members are looking forward to it and so am I.I want to again thank everyone who took the time to contribute. All those who we heard from have made a really important contribution and helped shape the important piece of work. I'm proud of the finished report our committee has presented and I think it will provide a strong foundation for long-term planning to address our declining attendance rate. In the words of the Minister the Hon Chris Hipkins "This is important and complicated work which this Government is committed to funding and fixing." Thank you Mr Speaker."