School attendance crisis as one in five miss 20 days a year
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What is the scale of Ireland’s school attendance crisis?
So one in five children in Ireland are now missing twenty or more school days every year. And it's not just an issue for the classroom. New ESRI research shows chronic absence is linked to lower leave insert results, poorer mental health, and reduced wellbeing well into adulthood. So what's driving this attendance crisis, and more importantly, how do we turn it round? For more on this, I'm joined by Onya O'Keefe, National Service Director of of Tusla Education Support Service. Morning, Anya.
Good morning, David. Thank you for having me.
Thanks Emilia for joining us. Just before uh we uh chat, I know your team sent a camera crew out to five schools across Ireland and asked children and young people directly what sort of things made it hard for them to come to school. Let's have a quick listen.
Sometimes I don't wanna go to school because either I have uh no energy, I'm so tired that I can't go to school. When you're trying to learn something new and you can't get it, just teachers could give you like a bit more help. Like even help you with lunch, like if you're stuck with something. My least favourite thing about school is probably The work gets harder when you come into secondary school. I don't get excited about wearing the school uniform. Especially with the lines in school, I feel like lunchtime it's very rushed. Like it's not actually you're done class and you get a break for a few minutes, it's like you're done class and you're rushing to get something and then you're back to class.
Have more like quiet downtime kind of thing, like ha relax a little bit in the hours of school really. Just sitting down listening to a teacher for forty minutes like it's hard. Uh in English c school because uh half English words I don't know. If I were to give some advice to grown ups then maybe I'd tell them sometimes children's problems they seem tiny 'cause they're tiny, but problems are always huge no matter the age.
Those are just some of the thoughts from school students around the country. Anya, um that figure of one in five children missing twenty or more days of their school year every year. I
I'm
kinda taken aback by that figure. It seems very large.
It's incredibly large, David. And before COVID we had an even sort of attendance rate of about with absence of it about five percent. And after COVID we settled at about one in five, twenty percent missing more than a month of the school year. And what we have come to now is this is a persistent problem. So one of the things I want to do is raise awareness that we have this significant problem with school attendance in Ireland.
Okay, I can understand how COVID um obviously upset everybody's routine and probably made it difficult for students to adjust to going back to school in person, but you would think at this stage that problem would have worked its way out of the system.
And I think that was our hope coming out of COVID that we would be able to wrap around and get back into our our old way of attending and get in regularly. What we've seen is we're not unique. So we've worked with the OECD to look at what's happening globally and it is a persistent problem globally. Attendance hasn't renormed. So now we need to look at well, what's actually causing that and working with ESRI in the Irish context, we're seeing not one driver but a multiplicity of different drivers.
And could you take me through some of the reasons I mean we heard some of the the voices of the the children and young people themselves, but could you tell me some of the reasons that you're coming up with with that research?
Yes, what we hear from children and young people is they really want to go to school. So in our consultations with them, they want to go to school, they want to be with their friends. You hear from their own voices there, they want breaks, they want downtime, you know, they they want to feel secure and safe. in terms of what um is happening, what we've seen is parents and and Irish people in general know that it's a child's right to go to school and that's over ninety six percent of people know that.
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