EDUCATION: Empty desks matter: tackling chronic absenteeism in schools

It’s difficult to know who is present and who is absent when you are in a crowded classroom of 45 students. It’s easy to criticise from a distance, but when you must face a new group of children and deal with petty disturbances along the way, it adds to the complexity.

Class teachers must take roll call every morning, but phoning home to check on absences can take time. Most phones immediately switch to voicemail, and parents and guardians don’t return calls.

I have been at my school in Soweto for four months now, and one thing I have observed is that many students are frequently absent. To be honest, most have legitimate reasons, but what their parents and guardians don’t realise is that frequent absenteeism, often called “chronic absenteeism”, has a consistently negative impact on students’ academic performance and broader life outcomes.

Research highlights several critical effects. Last year, researcher Doug Martin from Leeds Beckett University, in his article “The crisis in school attendance: Too many children and young people are missing out on school and we need to find answers”, noted that “300,000 children and young people are not attending school at all in England. That is almost 50% more than pre-pandemic.

“A record 140,000 missed half or more of school last year and 1.4 million missed at least 10% of school. To add to this crisis, almost one in three of these children and young people are living in poverty as measured by being able to have free school meals.”

Teachers know that every day a student misses school, the effects ripple far beyond the single absence. The research on hand shows just how far. For schools like ours, a low-fee independent Catholic school where many families already navigate real economic pressure, the stakes of chronic absenteeism are high.

The most immediate casualty is academic performance. Students who are frequently absent score lower in core subjects such as mathematics and reading. This pattern is confirmed in both large-scale studies and meta-analyses in different school systems.

This is not only about missed content. Students who are absent a lot become less engaged with school life and less connected to lessons, teachers and peers, which compounds over time. In communities where transport costs, family responsibilities and household issues can all keep a child from the classroom, a single missed day is rarely just about that one day.

It’s not just about one absent student. There is a spillover effect. When a significant number of students in a class are frequently absent, achievement suffers even among students who attend regularly. Teachers unconsciously slow down, repeat material and often lose classroom momentum. In a school, it is hard to stabilise the day’s rhythm and lift teaching standards; managing absence becomes a shared responsibility for the whole school.

Long-term consequences

If we don’t address these issues, the patterns harden into long-term educational consequences. A Brookings Institution report, Chronic Absenteeism: An Old Problem in Search of New Answers, argues that chronic absenteeism is one of the strongest predictors of dropping out of school, and students with high absenteeism rates are significantly less likely to complete high school or go on to graduate from tertiary institutions.

This closes the doors to opportunities before they even open. For families who have chosen a low-fee independent school to give their children a stronger academic foothold, this nullifies any sacrifice made.

The consequences go well beyond the school gates. Researchers link chronic childhood absenteeism to lower income in adulthood, poorer health outcomes and even reduced life expectancy, making school attendance a matter of lifelong wellbeing.

Research also shows that frequent absence disrupts social-emotional development and undermines the social skills and emotional resilience learners need to thrive.

My exploration of the reasons for absenteeism doesn’t consider issues such as curriculum relevance and boredom. For many students, schools are not exciting and engaging places.

All in all, the evidence is much worse than I imagined. Frequent absenteeism is more than a minor administrative concern to be logged in a register. It is a silent crisis with academic, social and economic consequences that can shadow a child for the rest of his or her life. The Department of Basic Education must realise that getting children to school is not just about compliance, and parents need to understand it is about protecting a future for which they are making sacrifices.

The Brookings Institution report notes that schools, courts and community groups have tried many approaches to keep children in school. Some work directly with students, some involve parents and others address bigger problems within the school system itself.

The report notes that hundreds of studies have looked at attendance programmes, but very few were done carefully enough to trust the results. One major review found that only 28 out of 391 studies were solid enough to draw conclusions from.

The researchers’ conclusion is that programmes that closely track at-risk students get mixed results. These programmes usually flag struggling students early and assign someone to check in with them regularly. For example, Check & Connect, a student engagement and dropout-prevention programme developed in the US, pairs students with a mentor who monitors attendance, grades and behaviour. It showed promise in small early trials with students who had disabilities, but a larger, more recent study found no real effect.

The Brookings Institution report argues that punitive laws don’t seem to help. Some states in America have passed laws threatening fines or even jail time for truant students or their parents. They have drawn criticism for their harshness, and there is no good evidence that these laws reduce absenteeism. It has also been found that “they tend to hit poor families and students with disabilities hardest”.

There is one interesting exception that is relevant in the American context: “No pass, no drive” laws, which tie a teen’s driver’s licence to school performance, do appear to reduce chronic absenteeism.

The cheapest interventions may be among the most effective. In the US, a simple, low-cost nudge to parents has shown real promise: a single postcard reminding parents that attendance matters boosted it by about 2.4%, whereas a similar mailed reminder cut absences by roughly 10%. Text messages to parents are increasingly popular because they’re cheap and scalable and they have improved attendance by as much as 17%.

A way forward

Chronic absenteeism is a persistent threat to student achievement and retention. Irregular attendance can be an early warning sign of deeper socioeconomic pressures, family instability or disengagement. I was terrible at managing paper-based registers: they are slow to complete, get lost and don’t offer a mechanism for early intervention.

The Department of Basic Education spends billions on smart boards – why not invest in digital attendance systems to address these shortcomings directly?

This can reduce the administrative burden and improve the accuracy and timeliness of the data collected.

Real-time parent notification closes the communication gap that so often allows absenteeism to go unaddressed. DM

Dr Mark Potterton is the principal of Immaculata Secondary School in Soweto, and director of the Three2Six Refugee Children’s Education Project.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R39. The e-edition of DM168 is now free for readers who are signed into their Daily Maverick account. Click on the cover of the newspaper below to access the e-edition.