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Speaker 1: Heather do the clen the Education Review Office reckons we're

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Speaker 1: now at a crisis point over chronic school absences in

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Speaker 1: New Zealand. The ERA report out today says eighty thousand

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Speaker 1: kids were chronically absent in term two. Now, David Seymour

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Speaker 1: is the Associate Associate Education Minister responsible for dealing with

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Speaker 1: true and seeing. He's with us. Now, Hey, David, Hi, Heather,

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Speaker 1: do you reckon that the changes that you're making is

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Speaker 1: going to fix this?

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Speaker 2: I do the headline figure that's shocked everybody of about

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Speaker 2: eighty thousand, so one in ten students being chronically absent.

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Speaker 2: We've known that for a while from the data that

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Speaker 2: we publish each term. It's crept up over the last

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Speaker 2: ten years, and I think it's fair to say it's

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Speaker 2: a crisis. However, the useful parts of the report that

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Speaker 2: I commissioned from AERO is that it shows why things

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Speaker 2: aren't working. You've got too many people who aren't talking

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Speaker 2: to each other, Attendance services of varying quality, police and

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Speaker 2: MSD at Ricky not really integrated into the system. And

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Speaker 2: what I'm proposing and building up this year as STAR,

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Speaker 2: which we call stepped Attendance Response System it has a

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Speaker 2: role for everybody, parents critically, but also students and the

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Speaker 2: school and the different government agencies like the attendance services.

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Speaker 2: I rung it to a ma Rickie police and so on,

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Speaker 2: because where I've seen success and this is why I

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Speaker 2: believe it will work. There's places like glen in this

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Speaker 2: school in East Auckland, Freiburg High in Palmerston North, places

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Speaker 2: like Burnside and christ Church where I visited and I

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Speaker 2: found that they're getting success because they have a group

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Speaker 2: of people, partly in the school, partly in the community,

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Speaker 2: who all work together. They're not shy about breaking privacy

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Speaker 2: laws if they really have to, and we're going to

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Speaker 2: have information sharing agreements amongst the departments as part of

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Speaker 2: this too. And they actually do everything possible to stop

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Speaker 2: kids for coming tru it, get them back if they are,

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Speaker 2: and keep them thereto great them so that they stay.

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Speaker 2: What the euro report shows is that while that's possible,

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Speaker 2: it only happens in a few places. The norm is

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Speaker 2: miscoordination and that's what the Star system is designed to fix. David.

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Speaker 1: If Chris Luxen considers this ban on the Nazi salute

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Speaker 1: by the mongrel mob and then takes it all the

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Speaker 1: way through to cabinet, and it gets to the cabinet stage,

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Speaker 1: would you support it?

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Speaker 2: Well, I'm pretty skeptical about any restriction on speech. The

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Speaker 2: problem with standing for free speech is you always end

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Speaker 2: up defending people that you wouldn't want to have over

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Speaker 2: for dinner yourself. So you know, I absolutely bore any

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Speaker 2: kind of Nazi symbolism. But there's another argument that if

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Speaker 2: people do have really stupid views like that and are

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Speaker 2: willing to self identify by making these symbols, then maybe

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Speaker 2: we should let them ay doing us all a favor.

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Speaker 1: Because we know that that's stupid. David, Thank you very much.

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Speaker 1: David Seymour Eggs part of Leader and of course Associate

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Speaker 1: Minister of Education. For more from Hither Duplessy Allen Drive,

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Speaker 1: listen live to news talks it'd be from four pm weekdays,

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Speaker 1: or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio