Let’s be very clear.
Truancy is incredibly damaging to all our children.
We must endeavor and strive for high school attendance and high educational achievement of that there can be no doubt, but the problem facing Truancy Tzar David Seymour is that his reactionary right wing voting base hate truant children for far more angry and damaged reasons.
To these voters, ‘Truant children’ is code for Māori the same way ‘gang member’ is, and they don’t want a culture of support for those truant children, they want punishment.
These reactionary voters fear truant kids and want fines to the parents.
The irony of the right taking away one of the silver bullets for truancy, free breakfasts and lunches, while demanding more school attendance would be funny if the stakes weren’t so high.
David Seymour may well want to solve the problem of Truancy with well thought out social policy, unfortunately his reactionary voter base want harsh sanctions and retribution.
Bashing Māori, Pacifica, beneficiaries, renters, state tenants, the disabled, gang members, prisoners and renters has political ramifications beyond the immediacy of the Election, it permeates into policy and creates counter productive outcomes that only manage to make the problem worse.
New Zealand requires political leadership, not the implementation of punitive measures to punish the people voters despise.
What we have at the moment is mob rule, not good Government.
First published on Waatea News.
There is no way that Seymour, or glib Chris, any politician, or public servant, or law, or regulation, should or could decide whether any child is sufficiently unwell to attend school. This is tyranny.
And were they to force such upon families, this government would need to ensure that appropriately qualified health practitioners exist, and are available, at short notice, to certify children as unwell. Can they do this ? No they can’t.
Am I the only responsible reasonable adult angry about this barbaric proposition ? No I’m not.
Pay the schools for kids attending. Review sum every 6 months
The attendance rate would rocket very quickly
Anne. The insidious issue here is actually an authoritarian government trying to usurp the rights of parents, and seemingly of medical professionals, by laying down the law about whether pupils are well enough to go to school.
How about we look to those countries who have education systems which work.
For example Finland.
Free school food for all.
Enter school system at 7.
Only one exam in entire time at school.
No uniforms.
5hours per day in class.
School teachers are among the highest paid professionals in Finland.
I could go on.
Peter Wilson. And nor do Finns bleat “look what Russia did to us, so we’re not gonna go to school.”
Hey gutless use you real nqme
Didn’t Finland just have school shoot up and they have different immigration settings and is their indigenous peoples being counted yet?
Really Bob when I looked at the NCEA passing rates before covid the Māori total immersion schools success outshone many of our posh private /boarding schools. And the other groups that did well was the all-girls Catholic colleges in Auckland. So, culture improves and is proven to be beneficial to educational outcomes as does religion. What do you base your diatribe on Bob your inherent bias.
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