Associate Education Minister David Seymour. Photo: RNZ / John Gerritsen
The government has started weekly reporting of school attendance figures.
Associate Education Minister David Seymour said a new interactive website will updated every week to show how many children were at school on a given day.
The figures showed daily attendance peaked at just over 88 percent several times this year and slumped to a low of 74 percent on the final day of the first term.
Last week national attendance ranged from nearly 89 percent on Tuesday to just shy of 82 percent on Friday.
"If we look across the regions, that pattern of about one in 10 students slumping out of attendance on Friday becomes clear straight away," Seymour said.
Considered by region, the figures showed attendance was highest in Otago/Southland at 91 percent on two days last week and lowest in Tai Tokerau at just over 76 percent on Friday last week.
Seymour said a daily attendance rate of 94 percent was the benchmark required to ensure 80 percent of children were at school more than 90 percent of the time - a target the government hoped to achieve by 2030.
He said reaching the target would require "major behavioural changes".
Seymour estimated last week's daily attendance averaged about 86 percent which would translate to a regular attendance rate of about 60 percent if sustained for an entire school term.
In term four last year, 54 percent of students were regular attenders.
Seymour said the government currently had no intention of publishing individual school data because it might discourage some from providing their figures.
He said publishing the data cost about $1 million a year and the only work required of schools was to push a button to send their figures to the ministry every week.
The information would help focus people on the problem and provide insights that would help solve it, he said.
"At the moment frankly the government has been flying blind for too long."
The Ministry of Education previously published daily attendance figures every week for about three-and-a-half years to track attendance during the height of the pandemic. It stopped publishing those figures in September last year.
Seymour said from term one next year, all schools would be required to report attendance figures every day.
"That will require law changes to be made and Cabinet has agreed that later this year we will amend the Education and Training Act so that the Education Secretary can direct schools to report their data daily," he said.
He said nearly 89 percent of schools were voluntarily providing their figures and only six schools did not have a computer system that allowed them to easily share their data.