On a typical school day in Australia, about 11% of students who should be at school are absent.
These absences add up quickly. Missing one day of school a fortnight is the equivalent of missing four weeks a year – and missing a whole year between the first day of school and the end of Year 10.
On our latest podcast, education experts Amy Haywood and Molly Chapman discuss how to improve school attendance, with host Kat Clay.
Transcript
Kat Clay: It is a familiar scene for all of us, the teacher taking the role and marking students as present or absent. Most of us had the odd sick day, or maybe your parents took you out of school for a family holiday, but what you might not know is that Australian school students today are missing far more school than they used to.
On a typical school day this year, about 11% of students who should have been at school didn’t make it to class. I am Kat Clay, and I’m joined today by education experts, Amy Haywood and Molly Chapman to unpack why this is happening, why it matters, and what we can do about it.
But before we start, I’ve got a little bit of news. Unfortunately, this is actually going to be my last podcast for the Grattan Institute. Outside of work I’m actually an award-winning game writer, and I’ve decided that in 2026 I’m going to take the plunge and become a full-time freelance game writer, and I’m really excited about that.
It has been a wonderful time hosting this podcast for the past six years. I can’t believe it’s been six gigs. And we’ve seen so much change in the Australian political and policy landscape in that time. It’s been an absolute honour and a privilege, and I am so grateful to the listeners like you who have supported us over these years.
But let’s turn back to education policy one final time. Amy, we’ve said about 11% of students who should have been at school didn’t make it to class. That is a lot of students missing school. I am assuming this is a problem.
Can you talk about why that is?
Amy Haywood: Your assumption is correct. The short answer is yes that is a problem. So, let’s think about it in terms of a class. I used to be a secondary English teacher, so if I had, say a class of 24 students on any given day, which means three of them are absent. And it could be Johnny, Jimmy, Jackie on Monday, but on Tuesday it might be completely different students that are missing the next day of class.
And that has a really big impact if you think about it. It makes it really hard for teachers to actually catch up those students that have missed class. But also keep everyone else moving along. And that has flow on effects. Even for the students that attend every single day, their learning suffers.
And so, we know that, unfortunately, each day is linked to a decline in academic achievement. Those build up over time. School is not just about tests. Obviously, there’s a really important role for social and emotional development.
Attending school means that we know students are safe. We can check in on their wellbeing, so if they’re absent, that can create problems in that area as well. And there’s another flow on impact, not just for students. If students aren’t at school, ideally, they’re somewhere else, probably being supervised by their parents.
That can make it really difficult if they need to take time off work. Or are trying to do that juggle of working from home while taking care of their kids.
Kat Clay: Molly? Is this a new problem or something that’s been building up for a long time?
Molly Chapman: It is actually quite a long-term problem, Kat. Australia’s attendance rate has been declining for more than a decade. It then nosedived during the pandemic though, and although there’s been some recovery since, including actually a small uptick this year, attendance still remains well below where it was before the pandemic.
As of semester one, this year, the attendance rate was 89%. That means that students missed 11% of school, or about four and a half weeks on average across the whole year. That’s about a week and a half, more than a decade ago. The other big problem is the drop in the number of students who attend school regularly, which is defined as at least 90% of school or missing about one day a fortnight.
Only three in five Australian students now attend school regularly compared with nearly four in five a decade. If the average student misses a day of school a fortnight, that’s four weeks over the course of a year, and by the end of year 10, they’ve missed out on roughly one year and one term of their schooling.
Kat Clay: Do we know what’s causing this decline?
Molly Chapman: It is actually really tricky to tell. Given attendance is the result of lots of different factors, individual to a student, their family, school, and community. We know that a student’s physical and mental health make a big difference as does how safe, calm, and welcoming their school is, or how engaged their parents are in their education, but until now, it’s actually been really hard to know why absences have been increasing. Most of the publicly available attendance data is quite high level. It’s great for spotting big trends, but not so great for understanding why they’re happening. If we want to know what’s driving this drop, we need to look under the hood.
And the good news is through some exciting new data; Grattan has been able to do just that. This novel data set includes individual attendance records for almost one third of government school students in Australia, spanning 2017 to 2024. So, for the first time, we can actually see how different types of absences have changed since the pandemic.
Kat Clay: So, you have some exciting new data. And that’s always exciting at Grattan when we get new data. What are the key insights you took away from analysing this data?
Molly Chapman: Two key insights really jump out from this analysis. First, that declining school attendance is a challenge for everyone. There’s a small but growing group of students who miss months, terms, or even entire years of school, and this group tends to get a lot of attention as it should because these students and their families need really intensive support to get back into the classroom.
But Australian students across the board are attending school less than they used to. And in fact, it’s the students who used to attend more than 90% of the time who have dropped off the most. And there’s some really interesting research coming out of the UK that shows a kind of tipping point around this 85 to 90% attendance mark.
Once students fall below that point, their attendance rarely bounces back, and that tells us something really important. We need to invest in early intervention and universal strategies that lift attendance for all students. Alongside those more targeted, intensive supports for students with the greater needs.
The second insight that we get from this analysis is that the biggest factor driving increased school absences across the community has been increased sick days. In 2024, students on average missed almost 12 days of school due to illness or medical appointments up from about six and a half in 2017.
That’s an additional week of school, missed per student each year. And at the same time, school absences for family reasons, that includes things like holidays during term times, they’ve more than doubled over that same period as well, averaging about four days a year in 2024. By contrast, if we look at disciplinary absences, that’s missing days due to things like suspensions.
Those have remained relatively low and stable over the same period.
Kat Clay: So, it sounds, actually, now that you’ve put it that way, it sounds quite alarming that there’s this decline in school attendance. Have Australian governments done anything to address this issue so far?
Molly Chapman: Well, Kat, the good news is that state and territory governments have recognized this problem and they’ve committed to addressing it. Last year as part of the Better and Fairer Schools agreement, which is an agreement between the Commonwealth and the state and territory governments, they actually set some really ambitious targets around attendance.
The main one was to restore the national attendance rate back to where it was before the pandemic in 2019. And to do that by the end of the decade. They also want to specifically lift the attendance rates of indigenous students, students from regional and remote locations, and students from disadvantaged schools.
These are really worthy goals, but the scale of actually achieving them is unprecedented in Australia. For context, in the decade that we’ve been collecting national attendance data, the overall attendance rate has improved only twice. The first occurred in 2023, which was immediately after the pandemic dip, and this was really a temporary rebound rather than the start of a sustained upward trend.
And since then, results have stagnated. This year’s uptick only really made up for last year’s decline. So, to achieve these targets, we’re going to need to improve in a way that we’ve never improved before, and that means we’re going to need to act in a way that we’ve never acted before.
Kat Clay: Well, this sounds very dramatic and it’s clearly a big problem, and so therefore requires reciprocated action. What steps can schools take to support higher levels of school attendance?
Amy Haywood: So, I think the first thing that’s really important to say is that schools can’t fix all the problems that impact on attendance. As Molly said before, there are really complex reasons and some of them extend well beyond the scope of schools for why students may not be able to make it to school.
But at the same time, schools can make a big difference. So, it takes a lot of effort uh, which requires taking what we call a whole school approach, which means really prioritizing attendance across all aspects of the school and making it a shared responsibility for all staff and all families. And in the research that we’ve put out, we’ve really painted that picture by telling the story of one school, Charles Dickens Primary School, which is actually a little primary school in England.
Kat Clay: Oh my gosh. I love that name so much. It’s so cute.
Amy Haywood: It is. It is. And the great thing about it is that it’s actually because Charles Dickens at some point in his life lived in that area, so hence the name. And whilst you might think we chose that school and wanted to profile that school because of the name, it was not just because of the name.
It’s because there doing really great work with attendance and getting some honestly exceptional results. The school serves a relatively disadvantaged community. Almost half of its students are eligible for free school meals, which is a measure of disadvantage in England that’s compared to nationally about a quarter of students on the whole, are eligible for free school meals. And yet despite this in the 2024-2025 school year, they had 96.4% of their students attend school regularly.
That’s even higher than before the pandemic. And when we compare it to Australian primary schools, it’s higher than 99.8% of our schools in 2024.
Kat Clay: Okay, so we need to know what is the secret sauce of Charles Dickens Primary School that we can apply to the broader school community in Australia.
Amy Haywood: So, there’s, two categories of things that they’re doing. The first one is getting the foundations right. So, they’re really focused on making sure that school and coming to school is a really invaluable and enjoyable place for students to be. That’s that first bucket. And that really considers things like making sure that they’ve got high quality evidence-based teaching approaches. So, students are engaged and they’re learning a lot in every single class. They have a consistent approach to behaviour. So those classes are calm, safe and then they’ve also got a school wellbeing curriculum program that’s for all students and a bit more support for the students that may need more support.
On top of that, they’ve just really thought about creating a culture of belonging at their school. They have around 50 lunchtime afterschool clubs, which honestly made me jealous. They range from, a craft club, a chess club, football skills club, even a Harry Potter Club, which feels very British.
And then from there, they’ve really thought about, okay, what are the systems and processes that we’re going to do to lift attendance? And that really focuses on firstly, setting high expectations in partnership with families. So, a Charles Dickens attendance below 95% is considered unsatisfactory, which is very high.
That message is really reinforced continually on enrolment when they’re going on school tours, in their regular newsletters when they’re talking with parents. And so, they’ve already set that expectation.
But when a student is absent, they have really clear systems and processes for following up. So, they have a dedicated attendance team, that’s the principal and attendance officer and a family support officer. They spend hours, the attendance officer in the morning checking the roll, contacting family straight away.
If they cannot work out, cannot get onto the families, that then that’s when they move to actually visiting home to make sure that students are safe, and they know where they are. And the result of that is that it means they have almost no absences that are left unexplained.
When there are really persistent absences, they have a really clear system for how they support families and escalate as they go. So, it might start with a letter home, then it moves to a one-on-one meeting, and they’re really focused on what are identifying, what are the barriers and offering those practical supports.
So when we spoke with the school principal and the attendance officer, they were telling us about those meetings that they have with parents and that those meetings are really 90% support, nurture, working out how to help them and having that relationship with families is really important because it means they know that the school cares, the staff care, but also that, I suppose as they put it very gently on their case they’re checking in, following up, and all of those things really put together, make a big difference to attendance at the school.
Kat Clay: Yeah, and I think that’s important too because all absences are for different reasons. There could be extended periods of illness, there could be, you know, mental health issues, people could be struggling with the school environment. There’s so much complexity there for educators to manage. I think there’s two things I take away from that, which is there’s this need for consistency and setting expectations early on for, from educators, so parents are on board. But also too, like I love this idea of just making school, a joy to attend, something that people really want to go to. And I think that’s so important that like children are excited about learning.
Unfortunately, we know that teachers in Australia are very stressed and very stretched in their roles already. It sounds like it goes beyond what schools can manage on their own at the moment. But you’ve looked at overseas for inspiration on what governments can do to help here.
Amy Haywood: That’s absolutely right. And I think you are right Kat. The goal is to have schools, individual schools that students want to come to and feel like they’re learning a lot every day at. The trick is in England they’ve been able to identify those schools, so then they can think about, okay, what’s the best way for the system to actually support schools to do that work? And in England we think that they’ve done a lot of things that set out a nice blueprint for how we can tackle the attendance problem in Australia.
So, since 2021, both the Conservative and the Labor government have made attendance a national priority, and you can tell. So, on a typical school day, Australia’s attendance rate is about 89%. In England, it’s 94%.
Kat Clay: So, learning from England, what can Australian governments do to address declining attendance?
Amy Haywood: There are a few practical steps that Australian governments should take. That should start with a really clear public awareness campaign on why school attendance matters. Parents in particular should hear that message and it should come from the top. So, in England they’ve had key figures across government who have consistently, publicly reinforced that message. So that’s really a step one.
Secondly, we should really think about modernizing our attendance data. It is not at the same level as England, and when we do so we should think about consistency. So having national codes for absences, actually having complete data. At the moment we don’t get data for Foundation and Year 11 and 12 students. It should be timely. We have a pretty long lag in terms of when that data comes out in Australia, and we also want it to be transparent so it’s accessible to the public and also to researchers so that attendance remains a high priority issue that we continue to focus on.
Kat Clay: Amy, the analysis of the student attendance data you talked about earlier is such a great example of what more detailed data can reveal about our system. What would this mean at a national level?
Amy Haywood: So at a national level, having greater transparency on that data would actually support a much more nuanced understanding of what are the complex drivers of absence, what steps can be taken to reduce absence, and then also attract that political and media attention required to keep it a priority. So that data means that systems can better also identify which schools have strong attendance practices, and that means that we can find the Australian equivalent of Charles Dickens Primary or develop them if we need to. In England, they know which of their schools are doing really well. And that means that they’ve been able to actually investigate those schools, develop practical resources based on what those schools are doing, and also establish these attendance hubs, which are high performing schools that model good practice and help others lift their attendance.
Molly Chapman: And Amy, Governments should also improve the guidance that they give to parents, particularly regarding health advice. We know that the leading cause of school absence is illness and maybe that’s fair enough. No parent wants to send their child to school when they’re seriously unwell. And we know from COVID that limiting the spread of nasty bugs is really important.
But we have to get the balance right between minimizing the impacts of missing school and preventing the spread of illness. Education and health departments should give much clearer guidance on when children are genuinely too sick for school. England’s National Health Service already does this with symptom specific guidance, and Australia should do the same.
Amy Haywood: That speaks to a broader point, Molly. Students, we know miss school for many reasons, and many of those reasons sit outside the education portfolio. So, we really also think that education ministers should step up and drive this work across government. So, working with leaders from health, justice, child and family services to make attendance a whole of government priority.
We’ve seen something similar in England. They did this through their Attendance Action Alliance, which was a cross-portfolio effort focused on lifting attendance and removing the barriers that keep kids out of school.
Kat Clay: Thank you so much, Amy and Molly for your insights on education. If you’d like to read more about what they’re talking about today, we’ll have an article on our website at grattan.edu.au that goes into further details about the attendance data they’ve analysed here. If you’d like to talk to us about school attendance, please do find us on social media at Grattan Institute on most social media networks.
I’d like to say a big thank you for listening through the years, and this is Kat Clay signing off for now.