School attendance improves but disparities remain

With the release of term 1 of 2026 school attendance data, we look at how attendance has improved in recent years and how the same disparities in attendance across ethnicities, socio-economic deprivation, and regions remain.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted school attendance.

A key benchmark for attendance is the proportion of students attending school for more than 90% of half days in a school term. In term 1 of 2019 (prior to the pandemic), this metric stood at 73% nationally. Two years later, things were very different. In early 2022, recorded COVID cases were rising exponentially as the omicron variant spread across the motu. Unsurprisingly, many students were not attending school due to illness. Consequently, in term 1 of 2022, the national school attendance rate had fallen to just 47%.

It’s worth noting that the Ministry of Education has recently adjusted historical attendance data to exclude periods when New Zealand was in Alert Level 3 or Level 4 lockdown, which has had the effect of raising measured attendance rates in 2020. For example, the attendance rate in term 1 of 2020 rose from 50.5% to 67.9% as a result of the Ministry’s adjustments.

Declining attendance and associated concerns about student achievement prompted action from the government. In June 2022, the (then) Labour Government set a target of 70% of students attending school for more than 90% of the time by 2024. The Coalition Government has subsequently made improving attendance a key priority, setting a target of 80% of students attending school for more than 90% of the time by 2030 and introducing several measures to achieve this target.

• In Term 1 of 2025, daily reporting and publication of school attendance data was introduced to increase transparency.
• From term 1 of 2026, all state and state-integrated schools in New Zealand are required to implement an Attendance Management Plan.
• Attendance Services has been given resources to increase the number of students that can be supported. Accountability of service providers has also increased. The attendance service works with students who are chronically absent from school and non-enrolled students. It works with schools who have already exhausted their own interventions.
• A public information campaign was launched to raise awareness of the importance of regular school attendance.

In term 1 of 2026, 69% of students were attending school more than 90% of the time, a 22 percentage point increase since term 1 of 2022 (Chart 1). This recovery in attendance was to be expected simply because we are no longer in the grip of a pandemic. But even as COVID-cases eased in 2023, there were signs of inertia in attendance figures as COVID had normalised non-attendance for some students. By term 1 of 2024, attendance was only up to 61%. To hit 69% two years later is an achievement for the Government, but attendance rates remain below the (pre-COVID) 73% attendance rate of term 1, 2019.

Justified absences peaked at 8.8% in term 1 of 2022 (meaning students were absent for justified reasons such as being unwell for 8.8% of the time), quickly fell to 6.4% in 2023 and have since fallen only a little to 5.7% in 2026. The 2026 figure remains above the 4.2% rate of justified absence in 2019. Now that the pandemic has run its course, the proportion of time that students are (justifiably) absent because of illness/medical reasons has fallen from 6.3% in term 1 of 2022 to 4.6% in term 1 of 2026. However, the 2026 figure is still higher than the 3.1% in term 1 of 2019.

Perhaps most encouraging is that unjustified absences have fallen from 6.5% in term 1 of 2022 to 3.6% in 2026, which is below the 3.7% in 2019. The fall is mainly because the proportion of time that students are truant from school has fallen from 3.0% of time in term 1 of 2022 to 1.0% in term 1 of 2026, which is below the 1.6% in term 1 of 2019.

If attendance rates maintain the trajectory they set from 2023 to 2026, they will surpass 80% by 2030. But 80% is a tough ask. We have attendance data for all four school terms going back to 2019, and for term 2 going back to 2011. Term 1 of 2019 is the high water mark of attendance rates at 73%. If attendance rates manage to recover to their 2019 rate, further improvements might be harder to come by.

One way to improve the overall attendance rate is to focus on increasing attendance among students and schools where it remains stubbornly low. There have been improvements in attendance across students of all ethnic groups, but attendance of Māori and Pacific students remains well below that of Asian, European, and Middle East/Latin American/African (MELAA) students.

In term 1 of 2022, Māori and Pacific student attendance was around 30% compared with just over 50% for Asian, European, and MELAA students. In term 1 of 2026, Māori and Pacific student attendance stood at 54% and 58% respectively, well below that of Asian (77%), European (72%), and MELAA (74%) students (Chart 2). Across all ethnicities, attendance rates in 2026 have yet to surpass 2019 rates.

Similar trends are evident across schools with different Schooling Equity Index (EQI) ratings. The EQI is a way of measuring the socio-economic barriers to achievement faced by students in a school. EQI ratings for individual schools are grouped into three categories: Fewer, Moderate, and More. Students at schools in the ‘Fewer’ group face fewer socio-economic barriers to achievement. Students at schools in the ‘More’ group face more barriers.

Attendance has increased across all three groups of schools, but attendance at schools where students face more socio-economic barriers to achievement continue to have the lowest attendance compared with the ‘Moderate’ and the ‘Fewer’ groups. We don’t yet have term 1, 2026 attendance by EQI group so Chart 3 compares term 4 of 2025 with the same term in 2022 and 2019.

Across schools where students face more socio-economic barriers to achievement, attendance has risen from 33% in 2019 to 40% in 2025 but remains below the 44% attendance in 2019. Comparing schools where students face more and fewer socio-economic barriers to achievement, attendance in term 4 of 2025 was 40% in the ‘More’ group and 68% in the ‘Fewer’ group – a 28 percentage point difference.

It’s the same story across regions. In term 1 of 2026, seven of the 16 regions had attendance rates of 70% or above, the highest being Otago with 73%, followed by Canterbury and Southland at 72%. The largest region, Auckland, recorded an attendance rate of 71%, with the Tāmaki Herenga Manawa (Central and East Auckland) Education Region recording an even higher rate, of 76%.

Seven regions had attendance rates between 60% and 70%, with only two regions recording rates below 60% - Northland at 55% and Gisborne at 57% (see Chart 4). All regions have seen an increase in attendance since 2022, all have yet to surpass their 2019 attendance rate, and (most concerningly) the relativities across regional attendance rates have remained pretty much the same throughout.

If you are interested in school attendance rates for schools in your Regional Council area or Territorial Authority, this data is published in the Infometrics Quarterly Economic Monitor dashboard.

Attendance has a strong influence on student wellbeing and attainment. Unfortunately, there are entrenched disparities in attendance between different students, schools, and regions. These disparities are unacceptable. Where you go to school should not have a material impact on how well you do at school.

Progressing towards national targets is all well and good but with all the focus on school attendance rates it would be good to see more attention paid to raising attendance among Māori and Pacific students, and in schools where students face more socio-economic barriers to achievement. This alone would probably raise the attendance in regions where attendance is currently low.

Attendance Services are mostly likely focussed on students and schools where attendance is lowest. Furthermore, schools where students face more socio-economic barriers (as measured by the EQI) receive more equity funding. But it clearly isn’t enough. Putting more resources into addressing disparities in attendance, and consulting schools and students on what measures work best, would be an effective way of starting to address disparities in attainment, raising overall attendance, and setting all our kids up to succeed in school.

I’m encouraged by a proactively released 2024 Cabinet Paper that outlines the Government’s approach to improving attendance in schools. In addition to acknowledging disparities in attendance between ethnic groups, the Paper includes a commitment to increase understanding about the causes of non-attendance through research and analysis to better target interventions, particularly for chronic non-attendance or students who are not enrolled.

Improving attendance is no simple task. As the Cabinet Paper points out, research shows that drivers of non-attendance are complex but can be grouped under three broad headings.

• School-level factors such as bullying and discrimination, poor teacher-student or teacher-parent relationships, curriculum not engaging enough, attendance related attitudes and norms in the school.
• Family-level factors such as lack of resources for transport, food or school-related materials, conflicting priorities, holidays and family-related trips, disruptive or traumatic events, negative intergenerational experiences in the education system, low parental expectations, and family violence.
• Community or system-level factors such as insecure housing, poverty, community attitudes to schooling, and lack of systemic support to address these pressures.

Improving attendance requires a multifaceted approach that gets to the roots of non-attendance such as poverty, intergenerational experiences and beliefs, and social norms. But it is worth the investment.