A school principal says the Government's targets to boost school attendance need to be higher as the country faces a truancy crisis and the future implications will be "horrendous".
In classrooms across the country, just under 60 percent of children are regularly turning up to school - that's around 330,000 children missing out on their education.
"It's a major crisis, absolutely appalling crisis and what we're looking at is a generation of illiterate and numerically disadvantaged children that become adults," Hora Hora School principal Pat Newman told Rebecca Wright on Newshub Late.
According to the Ministry of Education, regular attendance in schools has been declining since 2015 and was worsened by the impact of COVID-19.
The Ministry said the drop in attendance has been for everyone, at every year level, but the largest decline was in primary to secondary schools.
The Government has launched a new strategy to lift school attendance rates in primary and secondary schools, aiming to get 70 percent of young people in education by 2024.
The strategy is a part of the Government's $88 million funding package to help battle school truancy.
The new Attendance and Engagement Strategy outlines three key parts to boost attendance levels: Setting clear expectations for everyone involved, ambitious targets for attendance levels, and bold actions.
But while Newman said the targets are realistic, we need to be aiming higher.
"I think we should be aiming at the top. We say with kids if you have expectations they'll reach them, so my expectation would be out of this campaign that we hit 95 percent," Newman said.
Attendance is the first step for children to access education and with the attendance rate dropping, there are dire consequences for the future of our children and our wider social and economic outcomes.
"We are facing the biggest crisis eventually out of this," Newman said.
"The cost of the country eventually out of having 300,000 kids missing out of schools is horrendous, the social implications are horrendous. This is serious stuff."
He hopes the funding and initiatives aim at the community and schools take a part in helping make learning attractive for children to come back.
"The players have to get in behind it."
