One man’s plan to stop truancy in its bad tracks

‘Hopefully this one’s awake, he’s one of the ones I have to go inside and pull the blanket off.’’ Mose Skipworth stops the Porirua College van 100 metres down the hill from the school and runs up to aweatherboard house in Cannons Creek.

He knocks on the door and disappears for aminute then jogs back, hopping into the front seat with a smile. ‘‘Some mornings it’s a long wait, but if we don’t pick them up, they won’t get up at all.’’

Skipworth is the high school’s attendance and achievement officer. He expects most of his work will be attendance this year, and that the achievement will follow.

The year 11 student Skipworth’s arrived to pick up strides down the footpath into the van, grey school pants and black bumbag across his back.

He didn’t go to bed until 5 or 6am, he says. ‘‘You’ve normally told me a novel by now!’’ Skipworth says, raising his eyebrows.

Skipworth, a former student of the school, workswith about 17 boys in particular.

After an initial round of pick-ups, he drops the students at school and checks all are meeting with teachers or in class. If they haven’t turned up, he’s back out in the van again, at the front doors.

Labelled a national crisis by politicians, the number of kids regularly attending school across New Zealand has been on a decline since 2015. In 2019, only 57.7% of students were at schoolmore than 90% of the time – the measurement for regular attendance.

A 2020 Stuff investigation showed the drop had been occurring at every year level, in every decile, in all regions of the country.

By Term 2, 2021, there was a slight increase to 59.7% of regular national attendance. But long lockdowns in

Auckland, Waikato and Northland engulfed the rest of 2021, and Omicron has spread fiercely in schools from the beginning of this year.

The habit to miss school is now harder to break, Skipworth says. Some families fear the virus and don’t want kids to bring it home.

Youthworker Olano Afutoto says the presence of gangs has also re-entered the fold. It provides a sense of togetherness where Covid brought loneliness and isolation.

Skipworth agrees, but is hopeful.

‘‘A lot of the worst attenders Iwork with come from quite harsh backgrounds, gang backgrounds or from poverty. But I see a lot of potential in all of them.’’

A brightly painted portrait of Skipworth’s father, Phil, hangs outside the doors of the welfare team’s offices.

Phil was highly respected in the community, and worked at the high school as an attendance officer, then community liaison and restorative justice lead, for many years before his death last year. ‘‘Couldn’t really slip upmuch because my dad was the attendance officer’’, he says laughing, ‘‘No chance.’’

His surname carries currency in this neighbourhood as many families of students knew or were helped by Phil themselves.

Porirua College principal Ragne Maxwell says the connection to community is vital.

‘‘When a kid drops out now, the chances are Mose has already got a relationship, and he’s going round knocking on the door of a family he knows, and a kid he knows, and they know what he’s there for, and they’re buying into it.’’

In the past many schools had an attendance officer embedded in the school community, but services became centralised around 2013. Provided by the Ministry of Education, these officers often come from outside the community.

Under that model, once a kid returns to school, they are taken off the attendance services books, Maxwell says, only to drop out again two weeks later.

Skipworth is part of a new trial that moves back to the traditional style of an attendance officer. Porirua schools have been able to employ their own attendance officers, including two in the East, through the Pacific Innovation Fund. These officers meet withwhole families to get kids back to school. Skipworth also tries to identify students’ interests and hobbies, to help find ways of incorporating that into work and keeping them coming back to class.

The Government recently pledged $88 million to tackle truancy in different ways – and Maxwell says the model Skipworth is involved in, could help other schools too. ‘‘We’re immediately seeing a significant difference in the impact they are making.’’

A steaming hot mound of chips sits on a classroom table as Skipworth lays out a pile of colourful pictures.

He and Afutoto are running the agamalu boys group – a place where the boys can come and hang out, and talk about what’s going on in their lives.

‘‘The rules here is no judging,’’ Skipworth says at the beginning of the class, ‘‘we embrace where everyone comes from. This is us, we are all brothers.’’

Once they’ve done the work, they can eat some chips. They are asked to introduce themselves, explaining an image and drawing anything that represents them on awhite piece of cardboard. One student chooses a photo of a beach because ‘‘blue is a good colour’’, he says. Another chooses a photo of a street corner inWaitangirua. ‘‘’Cos it’s where I’m from,’’ he says.

One 15-year-old says he likes the group because he gets to see his friends and ‘‘kick back with Mose’’. ‘‘I can talk to them about my past and stuff.’’

When this teenager lived in Gisborne he says there was ‘‘a lot of bad stuff happening’’. He saw violence, and ‘‘not-sogood drugs’’ within his family, which has now stopped, he says. He likes going to class, including maths and PE.

‘‘Mose’s got mad support for me, he’s got heaps of support.’’

Skipworth says being ‘‘born and raised in the Creek’’ has helped him connect with the students he is trying to help.

‘‘I haven’t had it easy all the time growing up, and I can relate to a lot of the stuff these kids are going through.’’