FAIRFAX NZ Truancy rates are at a seven year high but prosecutions for truancy are declining.

More than 280,000 New Zealand students were regularly absent from school last year. This year, just one parent has been prosecuted for it. ADELE REDMOND reports.

She claimed her child's illness was intermittent, flaring up one day, settling down the day of school swimming sports, and returning the next.

But the mother-of-two had "cut herself off from a rational view" of the matter, according to Napier District Court judge Geoff Rea.

She used medical certificates to keep her children, both under 10, home for much of 2015, 2016 and up to half of the 2017 school year, sending them in on days when special activities were planned.

Despite the "tremendous amount" done by the school and other institutions, the mother believed she was "in the right, that these children were best off at home", Rea wrote in a judgment released last month.

READ MORE:

* School prosecutes mother who allowed children to miss school

* Seven-year low in school attendance blamed on flu spike

* Truancy often 'the outcome of a bigger problem'

* Family holidays make up 10% of school truancy

* Parents using 'questionable' truancy excuses

* 'We're failing kids over school attendance'

Eventually, "a prosecution was seen as the only way of bringing home to the defendant that she had fallen woefully short of her obligations as a parent". It is the only truancy case to be heard in New Zealand this year.

The mother, who could have been fined up to $3000, was discharged without penalty – "that would be counterproductive [in] all sorts of different ways", Rea said. Taxpayers picked up the $2181 legal bill.

Since 2010, just 58 cases of truancy have come before the courts. The most prosecutions occurred in 2011, when 23 cases were heard, and have dropped in the years since, down to three last year and two in 2016.

As prosecutions stagnate in the single figures, truancy and absenteeism are rising.

According to the Ministry of Education's annual attendance survey, about 282,000 students – 37 per cent of New Zealand schoolchildren – did not attend school regularly in term two last year, down 4 per cent on 2016 attendance rates. Regular attendance is defined as attending 90 per cent of half-days at school.

While that figure includes absences due to illness and vacations during term time, these accounted for five per cent and 0.7 per cent of class time respectively. Last year's report attributed a slight rise in sick days to a bad flu season.

However, the survey found "unjustified absences have increased steadily" over the last seven years to about 2 per cent of class time. About 40 per cent of time had off school was without reason.

Prosecution is considered a last resort, used when students' absences are ongoing, unjustified, and implicitly or explicitly condoned by their parents, and other attempts by the school to encourage regular attendance have failed.

Schools struggling to locate students first refer them to their local attendance service.

Truancy is frequently a symptom of other issues – mental illness, poverty and the red tape around support services are often the first barriers for attendance advisers, formerly known as truancy officers, to address.

EMILY MURPHY/FAIRFAX NZ Te Ora Hou Otautahi general manager Jono Campbell says truancy prosecutions are a "no win situation", but sometimes the best solution for students.

Jono Campbell, the manager of Christchurch attendance service Te Ora Hou Ōtautahi, said it can take several referrals before the service is able to establish a relationship with a truant or their family.

Most parents welcome the help but some are reticent and distrust the involvement of outside agencies.

"Sometimes, we have tried everything else to get into the room so we have to go to rockon," Campbell said.

Rockon – Reduce Our Community Kids Offending Now – provides an inter-agency approach. Police, Oranga Tamariki, and the Ministry of Education share information about the student, their family, and any issues that might be feeding the truancy.

Police hand-deliver a notice to the family about the intervention and, if that does not work, pursue a family group conference similar to the Youth Court system.

The point at which prosecution should be pursued was "a bit of a grey area", Campbell said.

"It's such an individual case-by-case [situation]. I don't think anyone wants to go to prosecution. It only gets there when the parent absolutely refuses to do what's required."

"In that case, it [prosecution] is really what's best for the student," he said.

Martin de Ruyter Youth advocate John Sandston says the lack of truancy prosecutions will give some parents the impression the system for enforcing attendance is a "toothless tiger".

John Sandston, a youth advocate for 20 years, has represented schools in truancy prosecutions in Nelson and Motueka. He said the threat of prosecution was sometimes enough to get families to take schooling more seriously.

A large proportion of offenders in the Youth Court have a history of truancy, and Sandston said the system for encouraging school attendance must not be "a toothless tiger".

Given the roughly 76,000 children absent from school on a daily basis, "it's remarkable we have only had one truancy prosecution in the last four months," he said.

"It sends a message to some parents that if I can't be bothered to send my child to school, no-one is going to do anything about it."

SUPPLIED New Zealand Principals' Federation president Whetu Cormick says it should be the Ministry of Education's job to lead truancy prosecutions, not individual schools'.

Schools, rather than the ministry, usually take parents to court, an arrangement Principals' Federation president Whetu Cormick​ disliked.

"They [the ministry] should be doing it. We are left with the task and we are also left with the cost," he said.

While the ministry had no set budget for truancy prosecutions, deputy secretary Katrina Casey said it had paid or reimbursed the costs of all 58 prosecutions for non-enrolment and non-attendance, worth $90,588, since 2010.

Parents who fail to enrol a child in school can be fined up to $3000 – in the last eight years, 15 families have faced that possibility in court. Those prosecutions are led by the ministry, since there is no school to do so.

The remaining 43 prosecutions for non-attendance during that same period were led by schools.

"We can lead this type of prosecution, but schools are better positioned to provide evidence because they will have attendance records and information about any past interventions," Casey said.

Cormick agreed: "We're better placed than someone in Wellington because we know our communities. You can't have Big Brother up the road saying 'we can see you're not coming to school, we're going to prosecute'."

But he and the ministry disagree on whether the expectation schools cover costs is a barrier to prosecution – and compelling chronic truants to return to school.

While Casey pointed to the ministry's history of reimbursing schools' legal costs, Cormick said schools feared there was no guarantee: "I do trust they will, but I guess it's on a case-by-case basis."

unknown Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin says the Government is reviewing the way the attendance service works.

He said he had approached the responsible minister, Tracey Martin, about having the ministry pay up front instead of "upon application".

Martin did not consider cost a barrier to schools' prosecutions. "There aren't many prosecutions because people don't like taking prosecutions," she said.

"It's incredibly complicated and time consuming and they [truants] are not a problem for boards of trustees; they're a problem for society."

She said she would prefer to focus what drives truancy, or attendance service providers' contracts, than more court cases.

"I know the Ministry [of Education] is looking at a new student management system that allows us to see more nuanced information but, in my view, it does come back to those attendance service contracts.

"It does make me wonder whether the attendance services should be taking those prosecutions because those are the people interacting with the families."

In declaring the Napier mother guilty, Judge Rea said the efforts of the school, local agencies and authorities to get her children into school were "extensive".

He warned her that if she failed to heed the court's warning, "forces beyond me will undoubtedly take charge and that may not be a happy outcome for you or your family".

"It is a sad day indeed when a school has to get to this stage to try and enforce your responsibilities for your own two children.

"You will know your children better than anyone else does, but they are entitled to the same advantages educationally in life as everybody else is."