ACT is proposing to fine parents of children not attending school as part of their policy to tackle New Zealand's "shocking" attendance rates.
ACT leader David Seymour and education spokesperson Chris Baillie unveiled a range of solutions to deal with New Zealand's truancy crisis, including consequences for parents and schools.
"A good education is the most important thing kids need if they're to grow up to have a fulfilling life and be contributing members of society," Seymour said.
"When I entered Parliament, I made education my focus. I was responsible for Charter Schools which had high attendance rates and inspired children who the education system wasn't working for. We need more out of the box thinking to keep students engaged."
Baillie, a former teacher, said New Zealand's education system has been in "decline" for several years and it's "important" kids are turning up regularly to school.
"With shocking recent attendance figures, New Zealand is not a sustainable society. It is not passing enough knowledge from one generation to the next to maintain first world status," Baillie said.
ACTs proposals
ACT is prosing five ideas to get kids back in the classroom regularly. The first is to have daily national attendance reporting.
ACT will require every school in New Zealand to fill out an electronic attendance register, which would be accessible by the Ministry of Education.
Schools would be required to record which students have not attended school on a particular day and whether that absence was justified or unjustified. The Ministry will publish daily attendance in real-time, building a national focus on the issue, ACT said.
The second proposal is an infringement notice regime for parents.
ACT would change the law so parents could be fined for poor attendance from their kids.
"ACT would change the Education and Training Act to allow the Ministry of Education to introduce an infringement notice regime for truancy," ACT said in a statement.
"Ensure Police use section 49 of the Education and Training Act to work with schools on truants and to take children they see out of school during school hours to either the school or home."
The third proposal is a traffic light system - based on a collection of data - which will set out clear expectations for the responsibilities of everyone relating to unjustified absences.
Green light - 10 percent absent - will require schools to attempt to make contact with a family on the day of an unjustified absence.
Orange light - 10-30 percent absent - will require schools to hold a meeting with the student and family so a plan can be developed to reintegrate the student back into the classroom regularly.
Red light - more than 30 percent truant - will see the student referred to the Ministry of Education, which will make a decision on possible actions including fines and referral to police.
ACT is also proposing to empower schools to help them deal with truancy by allowing them to hire their own truancy officers.
"The Government spends $38.5 million on truancy services and ACT says it should be given to schools to use for hiring their own truancy officers," ACT said
"The funding would be weighted to the Equity Index, so schools with more vulnerable student populations would receive more funding.'
The last proposal is putting more accountability on schools through mandatory reporting.
Schools would be required to report their attendance daily to a Ministry of Education database. ACT is proposing if schools fail to deliver their report to the Ministry then they would risk losing their funding.
Truancy has been a hot topic for the last couple of weeks after school attendance data for Term 2 of 2022 released earlier this month showed just 39.9 percent of students are attending schools and kura regularly, down from 64.2 percent in 2020.
Regular attendance is defined as attending more than 90 percent of half-days in set a period. For Term 2, that was 10 school weeks.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon has been vocal about New Zealand's poor attendance rate, calling out parents and school leaders.
Luxon spent last week targeting school leaders for the truancy issue, telling AM some principals are "not focussing as strongly only on getting kids to school as they can". That received backlash from principals, as well as Hipkins, who called for Luxon to apologise.
Luxon aimed his frustration at parents and said New Zealand has a "culture of excuses".
"You chose to have these kids, you have to wake up at 7am, get your kids to school at 8am," he said earlier this month.
"You have now got subsidised free lunches, free breakfasts, subsidised period products, subsidised school uniforms."
On Wednesday, Luxon refused to rule out penalising bad parents and principals in a truancy policy, that will be announced next year.
