Education Ministry figures show serious truancy spiked last year.

The ministry's attendance service dealt with nearly 28,754 cases last year, 40 percent or 8600 more than in 2021.

Most of the cases - 16,400 - involved children who had been absent from school so long their enrolment had lapsed.

Principals told RNZ they hope changes to the attendance service will bring the numbers down this year.

The ministry has nearly doubled the number of organisations contracted to get truants back to school from 45 last year to an expected 79 this year.

It says six organisations have left the attendance service, and 40 new ones are joining, many of them groups of schools.

The change follows long standing criticism of the service in some areas and worsening attendance figures.

In Northland, where school attendance rates are the lowest in the country, the ministry signed up five new attendance service providers.

Te Manihi Tumuaki (Northland Secondary School Principals Association) chair Alec Solomon says the change is good because the previous system was not working.

"It's a really complex taki to deal with and try and understand what are the symptoms and what are the causes. We're pretty happy that we've got a new lens across it and we've got new support and we need it," he said.

"It's a real benefit that we're looking for local solutions to local problems and we're hopeful."

Maintaining good attendance last year was difficult, Solomon says.

Schools had told students to stay home because of Covid but that made it difficult when the time came to encourage them that it was safe to come to class, he says.

"That was somewhat problematic."

Berkley Normal Middle School principal Nathan Leith is another who says the pandemic is part of the problem behind last year's poor attendance.

"We were telling kids 'if you are sick stay home, we don't want to have you at school, you need to stay home' and so as we slowly got through that, towards the end of last year we were then saying to families 'no, no, we need you at school'," Leith says.

"So I'm a little bit dubious about the doom and gloom around attendance. Sure, there are some issues there that we need to address, but I just wonder how much of it is off the back of Covid."

Leith says Berkley and nine other schools in a Kahui Ako, or formal cluster of schools, on the eastern side of Hamilton had combined to form one of the new attendance service providers.

The schools should be able to do a better job than the previous organisation because they worked with families every day, not just when attendance became a problem, he says.

"We, as a cluster of schools, meet weekly and we do talk about attendance issues and families who may need some extra support to get their children to school. When I mean extra support, things like lunches or food or sometimes uniforms, shoes, anything like that that might just be the thing that's stopping kids coming to school."

The Education Ministry says it has contracted more providers, including schools and iwi, because trials in Auckland and Kawerau show schools want organisations that are local.

"This allowed for faster responses to referrals, a more direct line of sight between schools and the local attendance service provider, strong relationships with school leaders, family and whānau enabling more collaborative processes.

"Local providers are able to recruit attendance advisers from local communities who have a deeper better understanding of their own community and local approaches to address barriers to attendance and enrolment."

Secondary Principals Association president Vaughan Couillault says in some areas such as his own, schools want closer control of their local attendance service and it seems to be working.

"It's still quite early days in terms of that model being deployed in our region. I think it's providing a lot better response. It's a lot more responsive, a lot more innovative and a lot more flexible in terms of being about to meet the needs of our community."

The attendance service dealt with 28,754 cases involving 23,522 children last year.

Sixty pe rcent of the cases involved Māori students and 82 per cent of the students were first-time referrals to the service.

The service helped 46 per cent of the 12,639 "unjustified absence" cases it closed last year return to school, 14 per cent had returned to school by the time the service caught up with them, and a further 20 per cent were reclassified as non-enrolled.

It closed 14,115 cases of non-enrolment last year, 2287 fewer than it opened.

Of those it closed, 45 per cent have already enrolled in a school, 24 per cent ere helped to enrol, and 17 per cent turned 16 and are no longer required to attend school.

-John Gerritsen/RNZ.