We have been seeing something of a new epidemic recently, an epidemic of lateness. It is easy to say ‘but it’s only 10 minutes’, but when you do the maths it’s a little bit more sinister.

Let’s say a student is consistently 10 minutes late each day. That’s 50 minutes a week, 500 minutes, or approximately 8 and half hours, or almost 2 days, per term. Over the course of a year that’s two weeks, TWO WEEKS, of school that that student has missed. That is two weeks of learning that the student has missed out on, and we know that for students to be successful they have to be in school.

The data gathered over the past 20 years about NCEA shows that for students to pass, on average they need to attend school at least 80% of the time. If you take two weeks out just for lateness, that leaves very little time to cover those normal bouts of sickness, and other life events, that crop up for everyone. This puts achievement seriously in danger, it makes failure more likely.

Please Please Please support us in making sure that your children get to school on time.

R Sutton

Tumuaki