The Ministry of Education was seeking a comprehensive system to identity, manage and monitor referrals for unjustified student absences. This was all part of a commitment to improving retention and engagement in learning,

SOLVING THE CHALLENGE

Sustained truancy has long been linked with youth offending and can lead to significantly reduced opportunities later in life. Student disengagement often starts with being late, followed by missing classes and then an entire day – until it escalates into absences of several days or weeks.

The Ministry of Education was seeking a comprehensive system to identity, manage and monitor school referrals to a specialist Attendance Service for students with unjustified absences. This would also be a supportive part of the Ministry’s commitment to providing Better Public Services.

But data from more than 2,000 schools was held by multiple agencies in spreadsheets or outdated databases – highlighting the need to compile all information in one place.

New Zealand law specifies that school-aged children are to be enrolled in education, so the Ministry also required comprehensive data on non-enrolled students.

To meet this need, the Assura team worked with the Ministry to carefully review the existing systems. Optimised workflows for both truancy and non-enrolment were established as part of what would become the new Attendance Service Application (ASA) system.

Key processes such as raising referrals were automated, and all data is now captured in an interactive database for ease of collation and analysis by the Ministry.

WITH RESULTS TO PROVE IT

Information by student is now easily accessed – by those who need to know – with incidences of truancy, follow-up actions and referrals tracked – so the right processes and procedures are followed.

With more than 2,000 users in the busy education sector, minimising training time was key. So we built the new system’s interface to be easy and familiar by mirrorring the ENROL system that schools already use.

To make the transition even easier, we migrated existing data from the last 10 years into the new system – including 140,000 cases of non-enrollment and 5,000 ‘active’ cases.

The new Attendance Service Application (ASA) system went live in July 2013 and was readily adopted by users.

The Ministry of Education now has improved visibility of unjustified absences and non-enrollments, but even better, the ASA system helps encourage attendance.