Education and health are never in a vacuum and multiple factors contribute to this. What we need to look at is long term data.
Your data if you went back 1-2 more years looks very different.
Attendance
2020–21: stable
2022: major collapse
2023: still weak
2024–2026: recovery underway
NZ attendance is improving fast, but still not back to pre-COVID levels
So while it's improving, it's not national having a crack down, it's more likely the covid kids are slowly getting back their education.
Certain year groups were effected more due to lockdowns. If you were 5 when it happened, you lost fundamental social skills.
If you were year 9, you didn't get the skills you needed to pass ncea lvl 1 and numeracy test.
If you were less privileged you were screwed no matter what.
Here is my solution but it would never happen. Social housing should never be lumped into a few suburbs. When that happens all those kids all go to the same school. Poor begets poor, uneducated begets uneducated. Not saying a minor amount of people don't lift themselves out of poverty but the majority stays like that.
As teachers, they only have so much time to attend to individual kids. If all 30 are needy, then essentially no one gets help.
If all 30 kids are below in mathematics, how do you help them to pass? Those below kids probably already hate mathematics and have nothing to strive for and this the cycle continues.
Wiz, while you are showing some stats and there are years that show improvement, but they aren't significant (in mathematics this essentially means no change) and to say National are doing a great job is false. But in saying that, Labour haven't done a good job either.
