Recovering our pre-pandemic attendance levels has proven to be a much more complex challenge than expected, and not only in our country. A few days ago, The Economist commented that, in the United States, Australia and England, improvements are far below expectations. The same article stated that one of the most plausible explanations is that, after having experienced distance learning, some students -and perhaps their parents- no longer believe that it is essential or even worth sitting in a classroom. In Chile, many are betting their chips on the arrival of spring to motivate students to go to class. However, last year national attendance in the last quarter of the year dropped to 82.2%, lower than even the months of June and July. I do not want to sow fatalism, but rather to sound the alarm: we cannot stand idly by and wait for what will happen between September and December. When looking for strategies to encourage school attendance, we recommend taking into account some interesting data that can shed light on where to put our efforts: One. Although illnesses -or fear of them- are usually the reasons most frequently stated by parents and students for missing classes, historically in our country attendance is notoriously lower on Fridays, with an average of five percentage points less than the rest of the days of the week. Could it be that students get sick more on Fridays? Two. According to a survey applied by Fundación Presente to more than 5 thousand students from 6th grade to 4th grade during the first semester of this year, 50% consider that it is not serious to miss school if their parent justifies the absence. Likewise, 31% consider that it is not serious to miss classes if they catch up with the subject and 25% feel that “not much happens at school”. Three. This is in addition to the fact that, on average, 4,600 parents of these same schools consider that it is only after 45 days of missing classes that we could consider absenteeism to be serious for a student. 45 days! Four. 52.3% of the students declare that they have rarely or never felt important for the school and 25% consider that nobody cares when they miss classes. Given this scenario, we invite you to focus this last quarter on raising awareness of the importance of attending classes every day, on creating the conditions for students to realize that every day is worthwhile, that there is damage to their education if they miss classes, whether excused or unexcused, and that families understand that after 10 days of absence, their children’s opportunities will be seriously damaged by chronic absenteeism.
Rebeca Molina
Executive Director
Fundación Educacional Presente
