Has School Attendance Monitoring Become Worse? (I found out after getting into trouble.)
Last week the media reported on a Department of Education plan to tackle attendance issues in primary schools. I found myself on the radio discussing it and I ventured that there were three reasons:
Holidays
A number of years ago when Irish people started going on foreign holidays, the travel companies hiked the prices during school holidays. This had the knock-on effect that families began taking their children out of school during term-time. After all, as far as they were told, Tusla didn’t get involved until a child missed 20 days of school.
COVID-19
I said that holidays during term time weren’t the main reason and, ultimately, the biggest cause of higher absenteeism was the COVID-19 pandemic where there was a huge attitude change in terms of sending children to school when they were sick. During the pandemic attendance levels fell to chronic levels and they haven’t recovered to levels before it.
A Change to the Process
My final point was one that got my hand slapped.
I said that when I began my job, if a child missed 20 days, all I needed to do was to contact my local welfare officer and they would take over. These days, that’s not the case.
I won’t go into the details of the hand slap as juicy as that may be. To be honest, I’m still a bit taken aback by it. Needless to say, my inability to accept the spin doctoring as fact, had something to do with it. However, I always try and make sure that if somebody has an issue with something I say, I make an attempt to fact check myself, so that’s what I decided to do.
Much like how I proved that the Department of Education’s own SET Allocations are based on junk data, I decided I would use the NEWB’s own data as well as some AI trickery to see what I could uncover.
First things first — if you think attendance has become more of a problem in recent years, you’re not imagining it. The data backs it up: Irish primary school attendance has taken a dip, and yes, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, before we get into the present, I want to go back as far as I can to when records of attendance were kept. I feel twenty years is a good metric. The reason for this is because that’s when I started taking a look into the education system and became aware of some of the systematic structures that affect things on the ground.
As I’d expected, when I researched, from 2005 to 2019, attendance at primary level in Ireland was largely stable. Schools averaged around 94–95% daily attendance. Roughly 1 in 10 pupils (about 11%) missed 20 or more days a year — which was the threshold for what was considered ‘chronic absenteeism’. These figures were relatively consistent including DEIS schools, which actually showed some improvements thanks to targeted support programmes.
But from 2020 onwards, things changed. The COVID-19 pandemic caused an explosion in absences due to illness, quarantine, and disruption. In 2021–22, absenteeism spiked dramatically — some schools lost over 15% of all days to absence. And in 2022–23, the numbers didn’t bounce back. In fact, over 110,000 primary students (roughly 25%) missed 20+ days that year — more than double the pre-pandemic norm. Among DEIS schools, the figure hit 42%.
We are a few years out of lockdown, so what exactly happened?
COVID-19
I don’t think anyone would be surprised to hear that COVID-19 is the biggest single factor. School closures in 2020 and 2021 meant extended absences for all children. Even after schools reopened, public health guidance led to cautious attendance — children were kept home at the slightest sign of illness. Over time, this changed habits. There seemed to be a mindset shift too. School attendance, once considered a must, became more optional in the minds of many families.
We also can’t discount the after-effects of the pandemic: a rise in anxiety, school refusal, and disengagement. Many teachers report that some children found school overwhelming after such a long break from normal routine. Issues like separation anxiety in infants and social anxiety in older students are also on the rise. Mental health has become a major attendance barrier, and the wellbeing gap is growing fastest in the most disadvantaged communities.
Disadvantage
Even before the pandemic, there was a clear link between disadvantage and absenteeism. But post-Covid, that divide widened. Children in poverty or precarious housing are now far more likely to miss school. The cost-of-living crisis hasn’t helped — many families are struggling to get children to school with food, uniforms, or reliable transport.
There are a growing number of children living in emergency accommodation and many facing instability at home. In these situations, school attendance often slips — not due to lack of value placed on education, but because families are simply trying to get by.
Attitudes
Before 2020, it was fair to say, in fact, culturally ingrained: you go to school unless you’re sick. But that mindset has definitely softened. In part, it’s because we spent two years telling parents to be cautious — and rightly so, in my view. But habits are hard to break, and some families haven’t returned to pre-pandemic expectations. Minor illnesses, mental health days, or holidays during term time are more commonly tolerated now.
Teachers and principals also report that some students are ‘out of the habit’ of regular attendance.
Red Tape
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed since becoming a principal in 2008, the amount of admin work one needs to do to access the tiniest of resources as increased immensely. When I started, if a child required a Special Needs Assistant, all that was needed was a report from a psychologist; now it requires a full school review which takes weeks, sometimes months, to process. When I started, if a child needed a place in a Special Class for Autism, all they needed was a diagnosis of autism; now they need specific reports with specific recommendations and they need to be filled out on a form. When I started, the School Completion Programme, was flexible for each school to decide on what needs their pupils had and project workers had little to no paperwork; these days the programme may as well be called the Form Completion Programme because we spend more time doing that than helping children. I could go on.
Essentially what this means is that teacher and principal workload has become unsustainable. A recent survey from the IPPN found that 69% of a principal’s time is now spent on administration. That leaves just 3% for leading teaching and learning — including attendance strategies.
Over the past two decades, Irish schools have been handed a relentless stream of new obligations: school self-evaluation, child safeguarding paperwork, data protection, standardised testing, Covid plans, admissions policies, and more. These aren’t necessarily bad policies — many are important. But cumulatively, they’ve eaten into the time teachers and principals have to do the human work: building relationships, checking in with families, noticing patterns early, and intervening before a child starts missing school regularly.
And, yes, if one wants a welfare officer to intervene in a child’s attendance today, compared to 20 years ago, there are several layers of red tape to get through. Let’s go through what happened before 2014 (when Tusla took over the NEWB) and after they took it on.
First things first — the rules never changed. If a child misses 20 or more school days in a year — for any reason — the school must report it.
Before 2014, the National Educational Welfare Board (NEWB) handled school attendance. While reporting was more manual through forms, emails, maybe spreadsheets, schools reported directly to a named local officer.
Despite the system being understaffed and slow, because the local officer knew the families, you’d more likely get a response if you called. On top of that, the NEWB’s sole focus was attendance and enforcing it. However, I always found it a very supportive service to families.
In 2014, the NEWB was folded into Tusla, Ireland’s child and family agency, and referrals no longer went through to one’s local welfare officer. They were sent through a portal to an office in Cork. This office would have no knowledge of the children being referred so it’s likely they used an algorithm to decide whether to process referrals.
Referral forms asked schools to input large amounts of paperwork including a long list of interventions the school was meant to have done, as if they’d have the time. No school was given any extra resourcing to monitor attendance. In fact, schools in the School Completion Programme would have traditional used project workers for monitoring of attendance but this was outlawed.
The service naturally thinks that this service is more structured and it’s supposed to be more “joined-up” with other services.
The reality is that Educational Welfare Officers (EWOs) are stretched, and many schools don’t hear back unless it’s a severe case. It never was, and never has been, and still isn’t the fault of EWOs.
In practice, on the ground, the following is the reality according to schools. We log attendance daily. We flag to parents early on if there are issues. Once a child hits 20 absences, we file a mandatory referral to Tusla. We may or may not get a response. I can only speak for the hundreds of principals I speak with. None received a response from the mandatory referral done at each reporting stage.
The truth is we keep going. We might chase it up with someone. We might hear nothing. Those in DEIS school with high absences, we’re doing this constantly. To be honest, it’s only when things are really serious, and when lucky, an EWO will make contact and set up a School Attendance Plan.
According to principals things have gotten worse. There’s more paperwork. There are more absences, especially post-Covid. There’s less follow-up because EWOs are overstretched. They’re still legally responsible to report, but the system behind it is hit-and-miss. The “welfare-based” approach is sound in theory, but there’s not enough staff or time to actually make it work properly.
Essentially, unless Tusla gets serious resourcing, the referral system is mostly a box-ticking exercise in many cases.
All of the above information came from OpenAI’s Deep Research and you’re more than welcome to look through it, the references, and so on, but it turns out that my three hypotheses weren’t inaccurate.
The following graphs do show that we are in a school attendance crisis.
Summary of the graphs:
- Percentage of Days Lost — Shows a stable trend until the spike in 2021/22 (Covid disruption), with partial recovery by 2022/23.
- Chronic Absenteeism — Illustrates the rise in students missing 20+ days, especially the alarming 42% among DEIS students in 2022/23.
- Combined Overview — Highlights both overall absence and chronic absenteeism, making the post-Covid impact more visible.
I don’t think any of that was under dispute. However, my hypothesis that the services fighting this is not performing as well as it used to. This is where my AI statistical analysis came to the fore. Check out this graph!
As you can see, according to data analysis, the post-2014 system is far less effective that the pre-2014 system in all but two areas. The reporting process is now marginally better and integrations with other services far exceed the previous model, which is unsurprising due to a move to technology-based referrals and the amalgamation of welfare services respectively since 2014.
In summary,
- Better digital reporting post-2014 (Tusla).
- Worse EWO availability, less consistent follow-up, and poorer school contact experience.
- Slower case resolution now than under the NEWB.
- Stronger integration with other services under Tusla, though this rarely offsets the delays and bureaucracy schools face.
As promised, all of this comes from Tusla’s own reports on its post 2014 services.
- Resource Constraints and Delays: Tusla’s EWS has acknowledged that response times to referrals are dependent on available resources. Non-urgent cases may experience delays in being assigned to an Educational Welfare Officer (EWO) — Source: Tusla
- Increased Administrative Burden: Schools are now required to complete a pre-referral checklist and provide detailed documentation of interventions before making a referral — Source: Tusla
- Digital Reporting Complexities: The transition to digital submissions via the Tusla Portal has introduced complexities, including the need for separate accounts for different types of reports and two-factor authentication, which some schools find cumbersome — Source: Tusla
So ultimately things are worse than they used to be. Attendance is worse and the services attempting to support them appear to be worse according to their own data.
It leaves me with one final question. Why on earth did that person ring me? As I said at the beginning, I’ve no issue if I get things wrong that I should be corrected, but in this case, I don’t think I have. To be honest, I’ve felt fairly uneasy since that call. However, I also think that maybe the interaction will have an impact. My hope is that as much as I’ve been belligerent enough to go to the trouble of proving myself right that Tusla will now go to the trouble of proving me wrong. If that’s the case, I’ll be delighted.
The Minister for Education has launched a new scheme, which is annoyingly for my SEO rankings on Google, called Anseo. I hope it’s successful. Ultimately what’s needed are boots on the ground like there were before 2014. It seems like that process is happening so let’s watch this space and hopefully in due course, I will be proved wrong.
