Schoolchildren are taking more sick leave than before pandemic

Students on average missed 11.6 days of school due to illness in 2024, compared with 6.6 days in 2017, with researchers saying parents are unsure when to send mildly unwell kids to school.

Students are taking one more week of sick leave each year than before the pandemic. Sick leave and medical appointments have been the biggest drivers of falling attendance. Picture: iStock

Students are taking an extra week of sick leave each year than before the pandemic, with researchers saying parents are unsure when to send mildly unwell kids to school and when to keep them at home.

Students on average missed 11.6 days of school from illness in 2024, compared to 6.6 days in 2017, new analysis by the Grattan Institute showed.

While the data doesn’t distinguish between mental and physical health, schools say they are seeing more students away because of mental illness as well.

School attendance has been falling nationally for more than a decade, but Covid accelerated the decline, particularly among students who once attended school regularly.

The first post-pandemic research on changes to attendance shows that sick leave and medical appointments have been the biggest drivers of falling attendance since before the pandemic.

Students also missed double the amount of school for family reasons, such as holidays, since pre-pandemic, about four days a year, and unexplained absences – where no reason is provided – have risen to five days on average.

The average number of absences for disciplinary reasons has remained stable, however.

“No parent wants to send their child to school and spread illness, but obviously we need to get the balance right between preventing that illness being spread and minimising the impact because we know that each day can be connected to a decline in academic achievement,” Grattan Institute deputy program director in education Amy Haywood said.

Grattan Institute deputy program director, education, Amy Haywood.

She said “anecdotally, when we’ve spoken to schools, they’ve raised mental health as an issue for students. I think there’s a real need to re-establish how important going to school is.

“Because we’ve had this big disruption of Covid and its changed things at school with lots of remote schooling … but also at home with a lot more working from home.

“That means we really need to send out that message that being there in person is important because it makes a difference academically, and socially and emotionally,” she said. “It should come from the top – political leaders, medical leaders, social services etc.”

The analysis also showed that the highest-attending students had fallen the most since before the pandemic. “I think we know if kids fall below that 85 to 90 per cent threshold, they often don’t recover on their attendance,” Ms Haywood said.

Remote and Indigenous kids miss about a quarter of the school year on average, or about 2.5 years from the first day of school to the end of year 10.

Remote students are absent 49 days a year, while Indigenous students are absent 44 days of the year – about twice as much as their non-Indigenous and non-remote peers.

The Grattan Institute’s policy brief calls on the government to follow England’s lead, with its health service putting out very specific guidance for parents on when to keep sick kids at home.

It provides explicit advice on a range of symptoms such as a high temperature, cold sores and conjunctivitis. The UK government has also run a public awareness campaign for parents that every school day matters, and provides close-to-live data on school attendance.

The UK’s updated health guidance recognises that being at school can help to alleviate issues related to anxiety and mental health issues.

England had improved its attendance rate since the pandemic to about 94 per cent, compared to Australia’s 88.8 per cent attendance rate. Since the pandemic, illness-related absence in the UK has fallen by 24 per cent,

“Parents each day thinking about, with their child, should they go to school, are they too ill or not? They need good information. And I think that giving them better information is a step in the right direction we can take from England,” Ms Haywood said.