The school attendance campaigns around Australia remind us that “every day counts”, which is vital for academic success, emotional well-being, and social connection. However, the reality is that national attendance has steadily declined, dropping from nearly 92% in 2018 to just over 88% in 2025.
In a recent blog post from AARE, Professor Kitty te Riele, Professor Martin Mills, Senior Lecturer Deborah Lynch, Research Fellow Emily Rudling, Professor Annemaree Carroll, and Professor Anna Sullivan highlight that focusing only on the report numbers risks missing a broader picture.
Current reports and campaigns are useful, but they have two major limitations:
- The voices of students, schools and communities facing entrenched disadvantage are missing.
- Official data often fails to capture the many ways in which students miss out on school.
To explore these issues further, the authors draw on two current Australian Research Council projects:
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Towards a School‑Community Based Approach to Addressing Student Absenteeism
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Fostering School Attendance for Students in Out‑of‑Home Care
From prior work on Queensland’s Every Day Counts initiative, researchers learned that attendance is shaped by broader societal forces—not simply school policies. In high‑poverty areas, principals described challenges such as housing instability, cost‑of‑living pressures, chronic unemployment, intergenerational poverty, and systemic racism—compounding emotional stresses for students and families. At the same time, schools face shortages of teachers and leaders, further limiting their ability to support attendance.
Schools themselves are under severe pressure. A principal from North Queensland described it like this:
“With the housing crisis, we have got a number of families who have some pretty dire living conditions…tents, no running water, cars, multiple families in homes…definitely impacts on coming to school, finding the uniform, washing the uniform…even eating the night before, having a good sleep… What we do need is to look at attendance as a community problem, not a school problem… if we had somehow support for a whole family… us being part of it, but not us running the stakeholders and driving the whole thing – because our resources are so depleted and it’s only getting worse.”
This research shows the value of collaboration with communities. Building relationships across schools, health, justice and social services, as well as with community and youth organisations, can make a difference. In some rural and remote areas, particularly in partnership with First Nations communities, researchers observe how this collaborative work can enhance school attendance.
Such remedies can only succeed if there is a clear recognition that schools cannot address wide-ranging issues of social injustice on their own. They are also only effective when those most directly affected feel that their voices are heard and that they are genuinely included in the decision-making process