According to Mineduc:
Mhile average monthly attendance in August was down 1.5 percentage points from the same month of the previous year, in September the drop was 0.5 points.
According to the latest attendance figures released by the Centro de Estudios del Ministerio de Educación, which refer to the months of August and September, for the first time this year there was a drop in class attendance when comparing August and September with the same month of the previous year.
The average monthly attendance at national level for August reached 82.3%, reflecting a decrease of 1.5 percentage points from 2022. For September, the average attendance was 83.5%, 0.5 percentage points lower than the same figure for the previous year. “While from March to July we could see that school attendance exceeded that of 2022, this trend becomes increasingly reduced until August, where the situation is reversed,” explains Rebeca Molina, executive director of Fundación Educacional Presente, an organization that has been working for a decade advising schools on the prevention of chronic absenteeism and the promotion of school attendance. If we were to compare these same months with the attendance of the pre-pandemic triennium 2017-2019, the situation becomes even more serious, since in August we would have a decrease of 6.8 percentage points and in September of 5.5. “The damage caused by the pandemic in terms of school lag was immense and in that sense there is much to recover, so school attendance becomes even more relevant than ever”, concludes the specialist in school attendance, calling on families to send their sons and daughters to school and / or kindergarten.
