Disengagement with the NZ state education system

Not counting students/families opting for private, state integrated and designated character school options – there are four major features of our current enrolment and attendance in the NZ Education system that need sunlight.

1. Our enrolments in Te Kura (formerly the Correspondence School) are now at 31,000 – a 32% increase since 2018. The achievement levels of this school are very low with 8.7% of leavers having UE.

2. Our attendance statistics remain in an incredibly poor state:

• full attendance (90%) for all ethnicities in Term 4 2024 was 58%
• full attendance for Maori was 44.1%
• full attendance for Pasifika was 42.4%

3. There is a massive amount of students not enrolled anywhere at all.

“Figures released under the Official Information Act to Newstalk ZB show nearly 10,000 5 to 13-year-olds were not enrolled in the official school system as of 2022 – a significant jump from slightly more than 6300 reported in the year before.”

Please note that the figure is just primary school students.

4. Home-school figures remain very high.

“At the middle of last year there were 10,757 children in homeschooling, about the same as in 2023 and not much less than 2022’s all-time high of 10,899.

Prior to the pandemic, homeschooling enrolments were increasing by 200-300 each year and in 2019 there were 6573 enrolments.”

5. Retention until 17 years old:

In 2023, 79 percent of school leavers remained at school until their 17th birthday. This is the lowest retention rate since 2013. Retention of senior students has dropped 6.4 percentage points since the peak rate in 2015.

National are treating all of these problems with their heads in the sand and only making incremental changes that will have marginal effects – at best.

Republished from the author’s Substack with permission.

Image credit: Giulia Squillace