School attendance in WA
School attendance is compulsory and schools in WA expect their students to be in class around 200 days a year.
On average, WA state primary school kids miss around 15 days of school per year and for secondary students that jumps to 25 days of school per year. These figures equate to around 16,000 children absent from WA public schools each day. While most students will have a good reason to be away, there are many who will not.
A child's school attendance pattern is known to be influenced by factors even before they reach school age. Lower attendance rates are more prevalent in households that are highly mobile, where parents have lower levels of education, or where parents experience financial strain, mental health problems or poor health. And a poor start with school attendance in Year 1 has been shown to carry on right through into high school, but on a much larger scale.
There is no safe threshold to missing school
Our researchers wanted to know how many days of absence kids could 'get away with' before it started to affect how they were doing at school. The answer was none.
They determined this using a combination of school enrolment figures, attendance records and NAPLAN results provided by the WA Education Department. They studied patterns of over 415,000 primary and high school students over a five-year time frame. In all analyses, average academic achievement on NAPLAN tests declined with any absence from school and continued to decline as absence rates increased.
Every day of absence made a difference, and this was particularly true for unauthorised absences. The effect of one day of absence was relatively small but added up quickly as more and more days were missed. The effect of missing days accumulated over time, so that school absence not only impacted achievement in the year in which the days were missed but in future years as well.
Our research impact
After conducting research for the Australian Government Department of Education, our researchers found there is a real need to develop new initiatives to encourage parents to understand the value of regular school attendance, even from a very young age, and to establish stable and beneficial routines for attending school.
They continue to look at:
- Ways to improve the outcomes for and engagement of disadvantaged students, using multiple approaches and shared responsibility between students, parents, schools and a range of government agencies.
- Examining in more detail the specific reasons that children miss school, and how common those reasons are, in order to target any interventions more effectively.
Download the Student Attendance and Educational Outcomes: Every Day Counts report [PDF].
