Associate Education Minister, David Seymour, has announced changes to how the Government contracts school attendance services in a bid to increase capacity to reach chronically absent students.
“In 2024, Ministry and ERO reviews found that the attendance services system wasn’t working. Funding was scattershot, distributed inefficiently, and failing to get results,” said Mr Seymour.
“We’ve re-organised the provision of attendance services, awarding new contracts and increasing support for services providing excellent results.
“School attendance has steadily improved over the last year, but there are still too many students absent. These new contracts fix what matters for kids and families,” he said.
Budget 2025 pledged $140 million to improve attendance over four years, including $123 million more for frontline services. All previous contracts have been stopped and replaced with new contracts, with 83 contracts awarded to Attendance Service Providers (ASPs) around the country to carry out this service, the Minister confirmed.
Under the new model, attendance services will:
- be able to reach twice as many chronically absent and non-enrolled students;
- be resourced to spend time understanding why students are not attending school and working out what changes or supports are needed to increase their attendance;
- collaborate more with family, schools and other agencies to support the development and implementation of plans for each student to get back to school;
- allocate up to 3% of their contract funding to address students’ unmet basic needs related to attendance, like school uniforms, devices, stationary and transport;
- be given stronger levers to escalate cases of chronic non-attendance where parents are unwilling to engage in solutions.
In addition, 170 schools with high numbers of chronically absent students have now been awarded contracts to provide additional in-school support to some of these students.
“We’re also developing new software. A new case management system will enable better data collection, analysis and monitoring at a student level. I was impressed by the systems some services had developed by themselves, so we want to spread that excellence across the entire country,” said Mr Seymour.
By the start of next year frontline attendance services will be better resourced, more accountable, better at effectively managing cases and more data driven, said the Minister.
“Also, from Term 1 2026 it will be mandatory for all schools and kura to have an attendance management plan in place, aligned to the Stepped Attendance Response (STAR),” he said.
“Our goal is clear: by 2030, 80% of students will attend school more than 90 per cent of the time. School attendance is the first step to better learning, better health, higher incomes and stronger communities. Every student deserves that chance and we’re fixing what matters to make it happen.”
