MissingSchool CEO, Megan Gilmour, was featured in an article from Education Review. To view the original article click here.
Australia can’t fix falling school results while ignoring who is missing from class
By Megan Gilmour, CEO and co-founder, MissingSchool
Australia’s latest NAPLAN and OECD PISA results should force us to connect two conversations we keep having separately: educational attainment and chronic school absence.
When reading and maths results fall, the national response turns to curriculum, teaching methods, classroom behaviour, teacher shortages, funding and, lately, screens. All of these things matter, but there is a more basic question we keep missing: are students able to access the learning we are measuring?
Nearly half of the Australian 15-year-olds who sat PISA reported skipping school in the fortnight before the test, almost double the OECD average. It is in the report and absent from every response to it.
You cannot talk seriously about declining attainment without talking about whether children are consistently connected to education in the first place.
Australia’s attendance figures show the scale. In 2019, 73.1 per cent of students in Years 1 to 10 attended school at least 90 per cent of the time. By 2025, that had fallen to 62.1 per cent. Put another way, 37.9 per cent missed more than one day a fortnight. Extend that measure across years 11 and 12, using state data the national collection doesn’t count, and roughly 1.5 million Australian children were persistently or chronically absent. Even this figure does not tell us enough.
A student recovering from cancer treatment, a child unable to enter the school grounds because of severe anxiety, a young carer staying home with a parent and a teenager deliberately skipping class can all disappear into the same broad attendance statistic.
The reason matters enormously when it comes to how governments and schools should respond. But it doesn’t change the learning that young person has missed.
Every absent day is missed learning and missed practice, and the assessments and conversations with teachers that go with them – not to mention missed connection with classmates. Once absence days accumulate, the gap widens.
For four consecutive years, NAPLAN has told us that around one in three students is not meeting minimum proficiency standards in literacy and numeracy. What it does not routinely tell us is how much school those students have missed, why they have missed it, or how chronic absence intersects with their results.
Broadening the lens to all school-aged children, those too unwell to sit the test, or who have moved outside mainstream education, drop out of the attainment picture altogether. They will reappear in productivity and wellbeing data down the line.
We keep analysing falling attainment without fully accounting for how much education students have actually received.
Chronic absence does not explain every disappointing PISA or NAPLAN result, but no serious strategy to lift attainment can ignore it.
Our national attendance collection still does not adequately disaggregate the reasons for absence. That leaves policymakers reaching too readily for behavioural responses: attendance campaigns, tougher language about truancy and incentives to get children through the school gate, even though many children are absent for reasons outside their control.
Health-related absence is a key driver. Across every socio-economic group, previous OECD data shows the most common reason students themselves gave for missing three or more consecutive months of school was illness. ABS National Health Survey 2022 found that 45% of children aged 0 to 14 live with at least one chronic health condition and a University of Sydney study put the figure for adolescents at 45.6%.
For these students, “improving attendance” cannot mean telling them to turn up. The goal is keeping them present in their own classroom with technology that already exists.
Australia already has the means for a student undergoing treatment, recovering at home or otherwise unable to attend physically to join their classroom in real time. Where it isn’t offered, the default is exit: the student is moved out of their school into online distance education, or into an unregulated online provider that calls itself a school.
MissingSchool has used connect-to-class technology to reconnect more than 8,000 classmates with absent students, trained around 900 teachers and put the approach in front of thousands more. A default position that demonises ‘digital’ abandons them.
Whether a child receives that continuity of learning still depends too heavily on where they live, which school they attend and whether an individual educator knows what is possible.
The Commonwealth and states have already set national attendance targets through the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. Meeting them requires governments to count chronic absence properly, connect attendance data with attainment data, and create a clear entitlement to continuity of education when physical attendance is impossible.
Someone needs to be accountable for this cohort. At present, responsibility for chronically absent students falls between health and education, between state and Commonwealth governments, and ultimately onto individual schools and families.
The debate about PISA and NAPLAN will focus on teaching, curriculum, devices, and the education system, but the path to attainment begins further back. A child must be connected to school before any curriculum reform, tutoring program or new teaching method can make a difference.
If Australia is serious about lifting attainment, chronic absence cannot be treated as a separate problem. We need to know who is missing, why they are missing, and how we keep them learning during the times they cannot physically be at school. Otherwise, we will keep debating results without addressing one of the obvious causes for children’s education stalling or falling behind.
