Boyer says ‘selfish’ parents face court for keeping kids home

SA’s education minister has delivered a blunt ultimatum to “selfish” parents who keep their kids at home.

Education Minister Blair Boyer has put “selfish” parents who stop their kids from going to school on notice, warning he will pursue court action against them.

Mr Boyer conceded there had been a past “reluctance” to prosecute parents for chronic truancy but he wanted to send a “strong message” that he would use all options available.

Shortly after becoming minister in late March he asked his department to review cases where “prosecution might be justified” and expects “a couple” to be presented to him for sign off within weeks.

There have been no prosecutions in the past five years.

If a child is absent for 10 days or more in a term it is considered “chronic non-attendance”.

Mr Boyer said the pending cases would “test” whether current laws strike the right balance and he was wiling to make changes if it proved too difficult to prosecute when authorities “firmly believe” it is warranted.

“If you aren’t allowing your kid to go to school and learn and socialise with other kids … I would say their behaviour is incredibly selfish,” he said.

Education Minister Blair Boyer. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

“We don’t want to target families who are struggling for other reasons … but there are families out there that are just taking the mickey, to be honest, because they think there’ll be no serious ramifications.

“I want to use all options available … not just because those parents who are actively preventing their children from attending school deserve to feel the full force of the law, but also to send a really strong message. We will take that action if need be.”

The Advertiser’s Save Our Kids campaign is lobbying for key changes to better safeguard at-risk children, including prosecuting parents who repeatedly fail to send them to school.

There are numerous cases where children have died or been seriously harmed and they had absent from school for long periods.

Two parents were last prosecuted in 2017.

In 2020 the maximum fine was increased from $500 to $5000, but the powers have not been used since.

Mr Boyer said there had been “a sense of reluctance” to prosecute parents because it could be difficult to prove they were “actively preventing” attendance, rather than truancy resulting from “dysfunction” or disadvantage in the home.

Mr Boyer stressed that prosecution should not be pursued when families were struggling with issues like mental illness, family violence or poverty and a large fine would “compound” those problems.

In other cases, he noted an absent student could be “from a family which is very much trying to get their kid to go and the kid themselves just doesn’t want to”.

The government employs 34 school truancy officers who are tasked with trying to engage parents and offer solutions to get children back to the classroom or online learning.

Child and Family Focus SA CEO Rob Martin questioned whether a fine would make a parent send their child to classes “if there is not already a strong willingness and desire to do so”.

“We need to make sure that the corrective mechanisms that we put in place actually compel parents to send their children to school,” Dr Martin said.

He urged community members to help, such as through “the simple act of knocking on the neighbour’s door and asking if their children are ready for school”.

Child Protection Minister Katrine Hildyard said she was “absolutely concerned” about chronic absenteeism and said agencies must to be “connected so that when a particular alarm bell rings, the system acts and intervenes as it should”.