News Item
SMS puts truants on the spot
Jennifer Buckingham - The Australian
07mar05
KIDS in the Sunraysia
area of western NSW who are planning to wag school better think again.
Their chances of getting away with it are slim, thanks to a new system
of alerting parents as soon as their absence is noted.
At 11.30am each day, just after the attendance roll is marked, a computer-generated SMS text message is sent to the mobile phones of parents whose children are not at school.
Parents can then either notify the school that their child is at home, or find out where their child has gone. Attendance rates have increased by more than 30 per cent.
NSW Department of Education attendance officer Gill Wakefield works with schools in the region, and says the system has been highly effective in an area where truancy is of great concern.
"It's a quite a large problem here. A lot of areas have problems with truancy, but statistics show that Aboriginal populations have truancy rates – two to three times higher than others – and one school here has 70 per cent Aboriginal students," Wakefield says.
The Council of Australian Governments (COAG), which has an Aboriginal working party dealing with issues of importance to the Aboriginal community, has been highly supportive.
School attendance is critical in keeping young people engaged and achieving in school, as well as reducing crime.
Ron Jackson, president of the Aboriginal Education Consulting Group in Coomealla, works closely with local high schools and says that parents have also responded positively.
"They think it's a good system because they don't have people chasing them all the time," Jackson says. "One of the problems before was finding people, and mobiles phones fixed that."
Wakefield says that most student absences in primary school are parent-condoned, with the children at home, but this doesn't mean that the SMS message is ignored.
"We had one parent who received a message and half an hour later, their kid was at school. It puts pressure on the kids and gives the parents support."
The system is funded by schools, which have made significant cuts in other spending areas such as school trips. Costs vary but are typically $7 to $14 per student in establishment costs, and half that in ongoing annual costs.
Created specifically for schools by MGM Wireless Ltd, the system is used in almost half of all government schools in South Australia.
Around 40 per cent of Sunraysia families have mobile phones, so there is a significant number of families that cannot be reached. But technology can extend the service to landline phones by sending a recorded voice message rather than a text message, but Sunraysia schools have not been able to install it.
"We have a dilemma with the Telstra enabling system, which means we haven't been able to see the full potential. I understand that Telstra is going to loan us the equipment for a while, so that is a breakthrough," says Wakefield.
MGM Wireless Chief Executive Officer Mark Fortunatow says automated messaging to parents saves schools time and money and has increased attendance by at least 25 per cent in schools using it. In some cases, it has virtually eliminated the problem, he says.
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