NAPLAN results: School attendance rates fail to recover from pandemic lows
School attendance has failed to recover from pandemic lows, with experts warning gentle parenting and reduced resilience are creating an unreliable future workforce | HOW DID YOUR SCHOOL PERFORM?
Attendance levels for school students are failing to recover from pre-pandemic lows, with education experts saying gentle parenting and a lack of resilience are contributing to the problem.
Principals say if poor attendance is left unchecked, Australia will have a workforce that turns up only 89 per cent of the time.
The national attendance level in 2025 – the percentage of students who attended at least nine out of 10 school days – was 62 per cent, much lower than the 2019 level of 73 per cent, new data from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority shows.
Centre for Independent Studies education policy expert Trisha Jha said it couldn’t be explained away by the pandemic, but that “something deeper was going on in terms of culture” that had been exacerbated by Covid.
“The trends are national, even states where we barely saw … any lockdowns have seen reductions in attendance ,” the research fellow in the CIS education program said.
“It’s very hard to get kids to come to school if parents don’t see the value in them being there or if parents find it easy to say ‘yes’ if the kids says for whatever reason they don’t want to go to school.”
She also said schoolchildren have much more to do at home now than 20 years ago.
“Schools are essentially being asked to compete with devices. There’s the temptations of technology that students can access (at home) combined with a more permissive parenting style driving at least part of the attendance problem.”
She described the parenting style as allowing children to make their own decisions, and being less willing to enter into conflict with them over expectations.
Why kids aren’t going back to school
Education deputy program director at the Grattan Institute, Amy Haywood said that during Covid there were “changes in the norms around how we view the importance of attending school and there is some work to re-establish how important it is to be at school each day.”
But she added there was also a downward trend in attendance pre-Covid. She, along with all other experts who spoke to The Australian, said there was not enough data to explain exactly why kids weren’t going to school.
The national attendance rate in 2025 – the number of days students attended school as a percentage of total school days – was 88.8 per cent, up 0.5 per cent year-on-year. The federal government hopes to increase that figure to pre-pandemic levels – 91.4 per cent – by 2030 through its school reform agreement signed with states and territories.
Ms Haywood said meeting the Albanese government’s 2030 and then 2035 attendance targets would be a huge challenge, and required “ambitious action”.
“We would need to see a year-on-year upward trend to meet (that target). We have not seen that in the history of the attendance data, since 2014,” she said.
“I think there’s room for more ambitious action and we should look to England,” she said, noting that a system-wide approach had improved its attendance rate to about 94 per cent. This strategy included publishing weekly data on attendance to support individual schools and students.
Schools above NAPLAN expectations
Education Minister Jason Clare said the increase on 2024 was “good news”.
“School attendance is going back up after years of decline. But it’s just the start,” he said, pointing to the Better and Fairer Schools agreement.
Australian Government Primary Principals Association president Pat Murphy said improving student attendance would require a national response on par with the teacher workforce shortage.
“If it’s not addressed it’s going to lead to more significant issues down the track for us as a country, such as having an impact on the economy. We can’t have a workforce that only turns up 89 per cent of the time. We need a workforce that’s reliable, that’s resilient. We see our role as being fundamental, not only in families’ lives and education, but turning up to school and work is fundamental to the Australian economy,” he said.
Poor school attendance linked to resilience
Mr Murphy said a lack of resilience was contributing to poor attendance rates, as was anxiety.
“What we require is that families send their kids to school. That means students knowing they will not always have perfect days; it’s about how you bounce back. The most important thing is to help build resilience in our children.
“While anxiety is a genuine factor in school refusal, research is clear that staying home only deepens the problem – the best outcomes come when schools and parents work together.”
Girraween Primary School Principal Jodi Warner said it was important to set expectations each day around attendance.
The school in northwest Sydney, with almost all its students coming from non-English-speaking backgrounds, has a 94 per cent attendance rate and an 83 per cent attendance level.
Girraween was included by ACARA on a list of schools in NSW with the greatest proportion of students who had made above-average progress on NAPLAN over the past three years.
“One of our big pushes this year was ‘on time, in line, by nine’. We start learning at 9am and the children know if they’re not in line at 9am ready to learn, they’re going to miss that important aspect of English we start teaching at 9am,” Ms Warner said.
“Not only has it affected our attendance, our attendance is well-above state average. It’s also affected our NAPLAN, our internal data … our phonics check in, we can really see that every child is really engaged in the curriculum and they don’t want to miss out. They want to be at school because everyone else is doing it.”
“If you have quality teachers, quality instruction, and ensuring that each teacher is using an explicit teaching model, every child can succeed.”
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