David Seymour. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
A government crackdown on teacher-only days during term time is a "red herring", school principals say.
Associate Minister of Education David Seymour announced on Thursday schools would no longer be allowed to hold teacher-only days during the school term.
And parents of students absent from school for 15 days or more may face prosecution.
A number of schools were having a teacher-only day on Friday - the last day of Term 3 - including one of the country's largest, Mount Albert Grammar School.
Remuera Intermediate principal Kyle Brewerton told Morning Report the idea was a "red herring".
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Any teacher-only days taken during the school year had "absolutely no impact" on the number of days they were open for teaching and learning, he said.
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They were "extremely important", and included time out for teachers to review assessment, report to families and provide professional development for teachers that was "timely and relevant", he said.
"We make it up at the end, or we start the year slightly earlier, so [we're] really at a loss as to why this has become such a feature [of government policy]."
Morning Report host Ingrid Hipkiss pressed Brewerton on whether such days were an unnecessary interruption to learning.
The scheduling of teacher-only days was "not random", he said.
They were often timed around long weekends, which was a "pragmatic choice".
"We often see that families will take that extra day, so common sense suggests that if we are going to lose a lot of kids - which doesn't make it right, but it happens - then it makes sense that we take that time."
It gives them some sort of continuity, he said.
"If we were to take - for example - a Wednesday in the middle of nowhere, well that would make absolutely no sense - it's quite an interruption. But you'll see that schools are quite systematic about where they place those days."
Papatoetoe High School principal Vaughan Couillaut said the Ministry of Education currently allowed schools some flexibility over when they started and ended the school year, as long as they were open for a predetermined number of days.
"It's all about communication with your community... if schools are creating teacher-only days, they're putting them in places that are the least disruptive to families, but essential to the [professional learning and development] of teachers on site."
Remuera Intermediate principal Kyle Brewerton says teacher-only days are important. Photo: RNZ / Yiting Lin
Hipkiss asked what actually happened on teacher-only days, and whether they could instead be held outside of school hours.
Brewerton said this was "fair enough to explore" and there had been "some intent to clarify the purpose of those days" - for example, whether parent-teacher interview days were classified as a school being open for instruction.
Hipkiss also asked whether there were more such days happening than there used to be.
Brewerton said the only "slight difference" was that some days had been added for the school curriculum refresh, "because teachers are having to rework an entire curriculum and, of course, that takes time on top of their day job".
'Already doing it'
In terms of the government's proposal for tracking attendance, "a lot of our good schools are already doing it", Brewerton said.
Couillaut said in his experience there were not too many parents "flipping the bird" to attendance officers. There were, however, challenging circumstances facing families where chronic disengagement was occurring, he said.
"What we're talking about, if you're getting through to prosecution, is long-term, sustained, condoned absence for no particular reason by parents who believe that is the right thing to do."
Principals would be looking for more details on the stepped attendance programme, he said.
"Are we talking about [15 days of absence over] a term? Are we talking about a year? Are we talking about unexplained absence only? What type of attendance or absenteeism is going to trigger things at each of those levels?"
Brewerton said schools had been "crying out for many, many years" for a cross-agency approach to absenteeism.
"We know... that those families we are talking about for the most part tend to fall inside the work of those other agencies so to have all agencies working together and wrapping around these families hopefully would see some better outcomes."
Seymour did not respond to a request to appear on Morning Report. But in a statement on Thursday evening he criticised students who were planning to miss school on Friday for a climate strike.
School Strike 4 Climate rallies were to be held around the country on Friday afternoon - the last day of term for many schools.
Seymour said students should be in school rather than protesting during school hours, and it had become far too common to sacrifice valuable learning time for other causes.
Students could have waited until Monday, when the holidays begin, he said.