There are reliable links between being bullied at school, poor attendance and poor academic achievement. New Zealand has serious problems with all three.  

While there is strong evidence linking bullying, absenteeism and poor achievement, the causal relationships between these phenomena are poorly understood. For example, it is plausible that being bullied increases the likelihood that children will be truant, with negative consequences for their learning. But it is equally plausible that children who achieve poorly are sometimes bullied for being ‘dumb’, leading to the avoidance of school. (A complication is that both high- and low-achieving students are at greater than average risk of being bullied.)  

In a recent literature review, Refa Laith and Tracy Vaillancourt from the University of Ottawa examined measured relationships between bullying, truancy, and educational achievement. The review focused on longitudinal studies, which helps to identify the causal direction of relationships between the variables. For example, if an increase in bullying at a school precedes a fall in academic achievement, but the converse is not true, it suggests that bullying causes poor achievement rather than the other way around. 

In fact, Laith and Vaillancourt’s found that being bullied can be both a cause and a consequence of low engagement and poor learning. Improving any of these three things, then, could contribute to a virtuous cycle of reduced bullying and improved attendance and learning.  

Directly addressing truancy is difficult. Truancy increased markedly in the aftermath of COVID lockdowns and is proving stubbornly difficult to shift.  

The government is introducing curriculum reforms and professional development for teachers that are likely to improve achievement, especially in critical areas like literacy and mathematics. But the reforms will take time to bed in, and the benefits for students who do not attend school regularly will be limited. 

To address bullying, Victoria University of Wellington’s Professor Vanessa Green favours the widespread adoption of the Finnish KiVa programme in New Zealand. (KiVa is Finnish for ‘kindness.’) The programme focusses both on intervening when bullying occurs and on preventing it in the first place.  

Green and her colleagues evaluated KiVa in the New Zealand context with positive results. They also noted international randomised trials of KiVa, which show that the programme can markedly reduce bullying within a year. 

Government funding for schools to adopt KiVa might not only reduce bullying and the suffering it causes, but also yield beneficial flow-on effects on both attendance and achievement.