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Children are missing more and more school days. Ontario has a plan to fix that, but not everyone's happy
School may be out for summer, but for a considerable number of students that won’t make a huge difference to the time spent in classrooms.
Chronic absenteeism, defined by experts as missing more than 10 per cent of school days, or about two instructional days per month, rose sharply during the pandemic but has stubbornly refused to come down, a trend seen throughout the Western world.
To combat the problem, the Ontario government announced a plan in April that would tie attendance to grades — in secondary schools only, so far.
Paul Calandra, the province’s education minister, said this spring that the new policy corrects a system that previously did not require actual student participation.
“I think this is an important change and it absolutely reflects what teachers and high-school teachers have told me would help them get better management of their classrooms and would help prepare their students for the real world,” he told reporters.
At a North York school this week, Calandra confirmed that Ontario will add the compulsory element to attendance in high schools next fall, and hinted it might eventually go beyond that.
“Some of the educators at the elementary level are very interested in some of the attendance and participation changes at the secondary level,” the minister said, “And have also expressed some desire to see some of that at the elementary level, But we’ll see how it goes.”
Ontario’s attendance-for-grades policy, then, could be earmarked for a significant expansion before it has even begun. And not everyone is thrilled about it.
To understand how we got to this point, we must first go back to the pandemic, when schools were closed to in-person learning for long stretches.
School attendance was effectively made optional by the authorities, and in many jurisdictions was actively discouraged if a student had any symptoms of illness once classrooms were re-opened. Meanwhile, the tools for remote learning were widely implemented, allowing students to be connected to the classroom in a manner that was unavailable pre-COVID, even if they didn’t attend school in person.
The resulting drop off in attendance, even several years after the pandemic subsided, has been steep. Ontario ministry data says just 40 per cent of secondary school students met the provincial standard — attending class on 90 per cent of available days — in the 2024-25 school year, down from 60 per cent before the pandemic. In the province’s elementary schools, about 55 per cent of students hit the standard in 2024-25, down from 70 per cent before COVID.
And while Ontario schools were closed longer during the pandemic than most jurisdictions, the attendance woes in the province are widely seen. Attendance Works, a California non-profit with a purpose that is very much explained by its name, says data from 31 U.S. states shows that almost half of schools (46 per cent) still had high rates of chronic absence, again defined as students missing more than 10 per cent of classes, in the 2024-25 academic year. That was close to double the rate (25 per cent) in the 2017-18 school year (but much lower than the rate, 63 per cent, in 2021-22, the first year that schools reopened.)
An OECD report published this month, citing data it collected from 35 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, said that “post-COVID, growing concerns emerged across countries that some learners were struggling to re-engage with school attendance, further increasing attention to the need for effective prevention and response strategies.”
The report also noted how absenteeism can be habit forming: “In New Zealand, chronically absent students are five times more likely to miss school again the following year,” it says. In the United Kingdom, more than 80 per cent of the students who missed more than 28 days of school in the 2021-22 year remained “persistently absent in 2022-23. And in Finland, the report says students who missed more than 20 per cent of school days in Grade 6 continued to miss classes above that rate through the rest of their education.
The reason this is a problem is simple: school attendance is a significant factor in student success.
“Attendance is very, very important for education,” says Kelly Gallagher-Mackay, a professor at Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University who studies education policy. “You can’t learn if you don’t show up. It is a precondition to educational success.”
She notes that there is plenty of evidence that shows attendance isn’t just a simple way to measure connection to school, it’s also a strong indicator of academic engagement and “just generally being a part of school life.”
The academic literature on the importance of attendance is extensive. Studies have found that poor attendance can severely impact reading proficiency by Grade 3, that chronic absenteeism will negatively affect grades — even when absences are excused — and that attendance levels in Grade 9 are a better predictor of graduation rates than even Grade 8 test scores.
Perhaps the simplest statement comes from the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics: “Students who attend school regularly have been shown to achieve at higher levels than students who do not have regular attendance.”
But while increased classroom time is a worthy goal, Gallagher-Mackay has concerns with the Ontario plan, which could be characterized as all stick, no carrot.
Attendance and participation will be worth 15 per cent of a student’s marks in Grades 9 and 10 next year, and 10 per cent in Grades 11 and 12. (Absences for legitimate illness, or while participating in school activities like sports or music, will remain acceptable. Attendance grades will be lowered only due to unexcused absences.)
“The fact that our first instinct is to say, ‘We’re going to take marks off,’ is really problematic,” Gallagher-Mackay says. “It increases the chance (that a student will) fail, and what we know is that failing a course in Grade 9 or 10 is one of the best predictors of dropout. It is not what we want.
To increase the negative pressure on Grade 9, she says, is “contrary to 20 years of student success policy.”
While there is little doubt that the pandemic exacerbated attendance problems system-wide, it’s a complex issue that has a host of contributing factors. Attendance rates tend to be lower in lower-income areas, and students who are struggling are often less motivated to go to school. Once they fall behind, that issue only accelerates as increased absences contribute to lower grades and the cycle gets worse.
Gallagher-Mackay says that ideally schools would identify frequent absences early and take more of a social-work type approach with students to understand and address the reasons why they are skipping school.
But even relatively benign attempts at improving attendance can receive pushback. When an elementary school in Bracebridge, in Ontario’s Muskoka region, announced an “Attendance Awareness Initiative” in March, it resulted in headlines about parents “voicing concerns” over the program. One report quoted a parent at the school who worried that encouraging improved attendance without addressing the reasons for absences could “lead to higher levels of burnout or disengagement.”
(Calandra said this week the attendance policy will not apply to Ontario elementary schools next fall. “We’re not quite there yet, to be honest with you,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes.”)
Which is where some of this can get quite tricky. How to tell the students who are missing school for legitimate reasons — academic struggles, problems at home, bullying in the schoolyard — from those who just aren’t bothering to show up? It is not unlike, in the post-pandemic world, trying to sort employees who work remotely because it increases their productivity and efficiency from those who don’t want to go to the office because they would rather not pay for child care.
“It’s definitely part of a broader societal questioning about the value of in-person, but I think it is also different because young people are there to learn,” Gallagher-Mackay says. “It is the mission of schooling is to make people into lifelong learners who have a mix of knowledge, skills, and attitudes.”
Those skills can include social skills like managing relationships and teamwork and collaboration, too. “Some of that we can do remotely, but not all of it,” she says.
Gallagher-Mackay notes that there is probably a developmental change as a result of the “vast, uncontrolled experiment” of spending so much of our lives on screens today — both kids and adults.
“But knowing that youth and childhood is a sensitive developmental period, wouldn’t we want robust, well-rounded inputs for kids? For students?” she says. “ I think we do.”
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