Chronic absenteeism has reached crisis proportions. One in five children in the United Kingdom are persistently absent from school and now described as “lost children.” The “staggering figure” has been identified as a national education crisis. In a rare show of unanimity, Education Secretary Jillian Keegan and Labour shadow secretary Bridget Phillipson both agree that it threatens the “life chances” of today’s generation.
Opening the London Sunday Times of January 7, 2024, a front-page news story grabbed U.K. readers attention. “1 in 4 parents now think it’s fine for kids to skip school.” That startling statistic was based upon a YouGov poll conducted in December 2023 for a national thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). It revealed, according to CSJ chief executive Andy Cook, that there was “fundamental work to be done in rebuilding the contract between families and schools.”
Everywhere you look education systems are now coming to terms with the new reality. “Chronic absenteeism” defined as missing 10 per cent of the school year (i.e., 18 days or more) has been normalized in post-pandemic times. What student data we have presents a consistent pattern across North America and from province-to-province across Canada.
Student absenteeism rates have more than doubled. American school data, compiled by Stanford Education professor Thomas Dee, confirmed that the national average was 28 per cent of students in 2020-21, double that of 2018-19. In Michigan, it rose to 39 per cent during the pandemic. More recent data shows some improvement, but some cities still report absenteeism rates of 40 per cent.
Finding reliable Canadian data requires considerable digging. In Ontario, the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board is fairly representative. It’s regular student absenteeism rate rose from 3 to 4 per cent in 2020 to between 8 and 14 per cent in November 2022. That same month, Manitoba’s largest school district in Winnipeg reported that 1 in 5 students were absent, considerably more than the typical rate of 12 to 14 per cent.
Provinces claim that they do not track rates of chronic absenteeism, but raw attendance data is reported in most cases. In New Brunswick’s Anglophone School District West, the average absentee rate in early 2023 (February to April) hovered around 2.4 days per month for grades 9-12 and around 1.8 days for K-8 students. Projected over 181 school days, record numbers of students were in danger of being chronically absent from school.
Until recently, Canadian researchers and school districts have been essentially “absent” on the matter of tracking student absenteeism. That very point was made quite effectively in a rather provocative September 2021 Canadian Journal of Education article by University of Ottawa researcher Anton Birioukov.
Student absenteeism in Canada tends to run higher than that in comparable Western countries. The number of Canadian students reporting skipping school on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has grown by 5.4% between 2015 and 2018 (OECD, 2018, 2019). During the same period the United Kingdom saw absenteeism drop by 5.6%, and the United States saw a tremendous 18.8% decline. Up until 2018, both countries reported lower absenteeism rates (UK 18.8%; US 19.9%) than Canada (23.2%).
Birioukov’s review of faculty profiles revealed that “no Canadian educational scholar investigates absenteeism as their primary area of research,” and he saw that as a critical policy issue. “The lack of empirical knowledge concerning student absenteeism,” he claimed, “is a contributing factor to the high levels of absenteeism evident in Canada.” His article was essentially “a call to action” for Canadian academics to provide the research to assist in addressing the problem.
Current rates of student absenteeism do threaten to undermine our relative success in instilling in the populace a commitment to ensuring school-age children are in regular attendance. Alarming rates of absenteeism suggest that parents as well as children do not prioritize school attendance to the degree they did a generation ago, when compulsory school attendance was generally accepted by a cross-section of school communities across the socio-economic spectrum.
Persistence of high absentee rates demonstrates that it is not a passing phenomenon. Schooling is becoming optional and it will have dire consequences for the “life chances’ of the pandemic generation. Winning students and their parents back is the strategic education issue of our time.
Why have Canadian researchers and school authorities been “absent” when it comes to tracking rates of chronic absenteeism? Without accurate data how can we assesses the seriousness of the problem? What role do parents play in ensuring regular school attendance? What can be done to reinstitute school-community attendance officers with a mandate to win students back to regular attendance?
Educhatter 