On any given school day in Australia this year, 11% of absenteeism was reflected. This isn’t a blip, as 11 years back in 2014, that figure was only 7%.
School attendance has been on the decline for more than a decade. The pandemic contributed significantly to this decline. Attendance bounced back a bit after lockdowns ended, with 2025 bringing about a small uptick. However, data reflect a quantum decline when compared with the levels that prevailed pre-pandemic.
The quantum amount of learning time lost is staggering. During this year, students missed on average 4.5 weeks of learning, from the 1st day of school to the end of year 10. This adds up to more than a year of missed class time for the average student.
Such absence isn’t a problem confined to a small group of students on the margins. Only 3 in 5 Australian students now tend to attend school regularly, which is at least 90% of the time. That translates to well over a million students who are missing out on academic, social and emotional benefits that tend to be reflected when attending every day.
Students in government schools tend to attend less often than those in Catholic and independent schools. The gaps may become chasms for Indigenous students and students in remote areas. On average, students tend to reflect absenteeism in about a quarter of the school, year after year. This phenomenon extends from the Foundation year until the end of year 10. It works out to about 2.5 years of lost time. This becomes a harsh reality, so it demands bold government action.
All state & territory governments, alongside the Commonwealth, have pledged to restore national school attendance rates to their pre-pandemic 2019 levels within the next 5 years, which would be by 2030. Such commitments include a special focus on indigenous students and regional and remote students, besides schools from disadvantaged areas. Governments have pledged to achieve their objectives within the next decade, specifically by 2035. Attendance at these groups will match the rate of the overall student population.
Australia’s political segment should view meeting these targets as a moral imperative. However, acknowledging the extraordinarily ambitious nature of these targets is crucial. Therefore, adopting a traditional approach is likely to ensure failure.
There’s no way that one can get out of this crisis. Australia needs a wholesale rethink of how to get the children to return to the classroom.
Australia’s not alone. Many countries share the same fate and have been experiencing issues in meeting school attendance standards to where they likely need to be. Some have taken the issue far more seriously than Australia. For instance, England is one such country from which Australia can learn.
Students in England attend school 90% of the time. Australia lags at 89%. England has made attendance a national priority. This drives a relentless public messaging campaign to elevate the importance of school attendance. It radically increases the transparency of attendance data. It sets higher expectations for families and schools. It adopts a whole-of-government approach to tackle barriers to attendance. England‘s approach reflects five big opportunities that Australia should seize now.
First of all, Australia needs to launch a national public campaign on why school attendance matters. Parents always need clear, consistent messages from political leaders. Education departments and schools should also contribute to this campaign. England’s ministers talk about attendance consistently, and this methodology seems to work. When the message originates from the top, it tends to filter better down through schools & parents.
Secondly, modernise Australia’s patchwork approach to attendance data. Currently, every state and sector collects different types of attendance data and publishes it painfully slowly, if at all. Parents and the public deserve to know the status of what’s happening. Consistent, transparent, and timely data would create a much clearer picture of the attendance challenge, besides the success stories. It may also help drive political commitments to improve.
