‘Schools become a prison': Parents must take responsibility for truancy, expert says
Victorian schools are making it too easy for parents to keep their children away from class, a major Melbourne education conference has been told.
Education authorities are grappling with the growing problem of school non-attendance using poor data and outdated methods, University of Melbourne associate professor Lisa McKay-Brown told this year's Age Schools Summit on Wednesday.
McKay-Brown challenged the state to adopt a fresh approach to school attendance, based on the academic's study of successful anti-truancy programs around the world.
'For those who are chronically absent ... schools become a prison,' she said.
Brown travelled to countries including the Netherlands, the United States and Chile to study school absenteeism.
Brown learned that in the Netherlands, schools took a proactive approach when a child failed to show up, rather than the Australian approach of expecting parents to report a student's absence.
'If a student's absent, [school authorities] contact the family straight away,' Brown told Wednesday's conference.
'It's far too easy for [families] to just mark an absence on an app and not engage with [the school], but if we start engaging with them straight away, then we can start to preventatively think about what we might have to do to support them to get their children to school.'
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