In what is the first public insight into how and why school absences have changed since the pandemic, a new policy brief by Grattan Institute has warned that on a typical school day, about 11 per cent of students who should be at school are notably absent from classrooms, with learning losses quickly compounding.
Lead researcher Molly Chapman tells EducationHQ that while attendance figures nosedived during COVID lockdowns, the expected rebound just hasn’t played out in the data.
“We’ve really now stagnated at a point that’s lower than we were in, say, 2019.
“So now that it’s been kind of three years, where [school attendance hasn’t] really improved that much, I think it’s started ringing some alarm bells for people,” Chapman says.
Drawing on records for almost one third of public school students, the team charted individual attendance patterns from 2017 to 2024, finding illness is the leading factor driving increased student absence across the board.
In 2024, students on average missed 11.6 days of school due to illness or medical appointments, up from 6.6 days in 2017.
This amounts to an additional week of school missed per student, due to illness alone.
Shifting parental attitudes might well be behind this alarming trend, Chapman suggests.
“And to some extent, that’s probably unsurprising right after the pandemic.
“We were told to stay at home if you’re sick. It’s going to take a little while to unlearn that. The temptation is to maybe err on the side of caution, and if you’re not sure, to keep your kid at home because you don’t want to be the parent that gets in trouble for sending your child to school when they’re too sick.
“So, I think it’s about maybe renormalising some of those attitudes to attendance,” she adds.
Research from the UK suggests there is a tipping point when it comes to attendance: students who attend at least 85-90 per cent of school tend to sustain or improve their attendance the following year, but those who don’t rarely claw back lost ground, the report warns.
Grattan researchers say this means a large cohort of Australian students are at significant risk of further disengaging from school entirely.
Attendance habits start early on, they flag.
Students who miss school in the early years are more likely to continue doing so throughout their education, while the transition to secondary school is a particular danger zone for increased absences.
Just half of Year 10 students attend school regularly (at least 90 per cent of the time), the report highlights, with disadvantaged students missing more school than their advantaged peers.
About 40 per cent of students – more than 1.2 million – miss at least one day of school every two weeks, the anaylsis found.
The approach taken by individual schools can make a huge difference though, Chapman says.
“We spoke to a school in England, Charles Dickens Primary School, which has incredibly high attendance.
“It’s something like 96.4 per cent of their students attend school regularly. And what we found from them was that it wasn’t one thing (that did it).
“There’s no silver bullet to solving attendance. I wish there was … but it’s more of a whole-school approach – it’s prioritising attendance across the schools’ scope of what they do.”
It starts with getting your foundations right, Chapman advises school leaders.
“… just making school a really valuable and meaningful place for kids to be; good teaching, a really good grasp on attendance and discipline and that kind of thing.
“And also fostering that really good sense of belonging. So those things are all vital.
“And then on top of that, having the really rigorous attendance processes. So, chasing up those absences, making sure you’ve got the really strong norms and expectations, and making sure parents are really, really clear on that.”
Swift escalation processes should kick in when students are absent on multiple occasions, Chapman says, where school leaders talk with the parents to identify and address any barriers.
“All of those things together, we’ve seen how that can really turn the dial, like in cases like Charles Dickens Primary School.”
But school-level effort is just one part of the picture, the researchers say. This is a problem that demands immediate policy action.
Australia needs a huge ‘rethink’ on how it tackles school attendance, not least if governments are serious about meeting the three ambitious targets they set on this front as part of the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement 2025-2034, Chapman argues.
While ‘we have a long way to go’, England can show us how to begin this work at the system level, the researcher says.
According to the analysis, England’s approach to attendance offers five clear steps on where our governments should start:
- Launch a public campaign on why attending school is so important;
- Overhaul attendance data;
- Share practice from schools that have strong attendance;
- Give parents better health advice; and,
- Make school attendance a whole-of-government priority.
Chapman is a big fan of the reform efforts consecutive British governments have taken to boost school attendance in recent years.
“What they’re doing in England is pretty incredible. We’ve seen both conservative and Labour governments jointly agree that attendance is a national priority, especially since the pandemic…
“They’ve had this really big public awareness campaign, this really big push that’s come from the top in terms of messaging on the importance of attendance from senior political leaders across government, which has really echoed and then filtered down through schools.”
School attendance data is now reported on every day in England and published every fortnight, Chapman adds.
“So, if we went on the Government’s website right now, we could look at the number of kids that missed school two weeks ago.
“It’s really cool. And they’ve got it (listed) by absence types and (with) all this level of detail – we have nothing like that in Australia.
“So, they’ve just got a better understanding of what’s going on, and that’s informed the Government’s decisions…
“I think schools in England probably just do receive more and better guidance from the Government in terms of what they should be doing.”
