School Absenteeism

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:53): My question is to the Minister for Education. Acknowledging the importance of attending school every day, can the minister inform the house of statistics of the lowest, highest and average number of days of absenteeism on a per student basis in government schools last year? How many parents have been convicted for failing to send their children to school, and how will a conviction send a message to other parents in cases where non-attendance is an indicator of assistance being desperately needed, often in very complex family situations?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (15:53): The numeric detail the member has asked for I will have to take on notice, but the average attendance rates, if you count attendance and authorised absences such as through illness, which is inevitable with children, is just over 97 per cent on any given day. We have a policy and we have the resources dedicated to supporting families and children to engage with school. This takes a variety of forms, including the 22 people engaged in attendance work, and now also including the nearly 60 wellbeing practitioners who are there to support particularly vulnerable families.

It is also about the FLO program that we run in nearly all our secondary schools, which is the Flexible Learning Options program that is about engaging students who are finding traditional schooling approaches difficult. We are absolutely dedicated not only to all children attending school but to maintaining school attendance until the end of school and completion with SACE.

On the subject of the SACE, of course, the changes in 2011 have resulted in a significantly higher number of students completing school, and that has meant much deeper engagement for a lot of students. That has been partly a function of the broadening of what is able to be recognised as part of your high school study and also a renewed focus for principals and teachers on the importance of completing school and the importance of working with each individual student to work out what barriers they have.

The member has asked specifically about prosecutions. We have taken two parents to court recently. They were both successful prosecutions, although the magistrates determined that one of those would not record a conviction and the other one did record a conviction. I don't want to go into a lot of detail about the individual circumstances of those families. I am extremely sensitive to the fact that there are children who are caught up in those cases, who are attending school and who have friends and classmates who may well be interested in what is being recorded in the media.

However, I will say that we would never take a prosecution unless we had fully exhausted every other option of working with the family and that the representative number of days that are taken to court are representative of many, many, many days that have been missed for those kids. While I have sympathy of course for vulnerable families, I am well aware of the power of education in changing the path for those vulnerable families for the next generation, and I will not apologise for insisting that children belong at school. It is the only opportunity many have to change the course of their lives.

Any adult who is engaged with those children who does not support them to go to school is doing them a disservice. It may be for very many complex reasons that we may feel an enormous amount of compassion about; nonetheless, it is crucial that children attend school and it is also crucial that they complete school. This government has dedicated an enormous amount of policy work and an enormous number of resources and every single teacher and every single principal to make that happen for all our children.