Attendance at Ontario high schools has plummeted below 50 per cent, according to newly released data, as the province looks to reward students with marks for turning up to class.
As part of a new bill that includes an overhaul of school board governance, the Progressive Conservatives are planning to award students in grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 a portion of their final mark for attending class.
It’s a measure Minister Paul Calandra said was suggested to him by teachers who are struggling with truancy and classroom control.
“It is an idea that came exclusively from my engagement with teachers; it wasn’t on my radar at all,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
“I have to be honest with you, when I took over the position, I actually still thought attendance was part of the mark, and then I realized that for many, many years it had been taken out.”
Now, data from the government lays bare the extent of student absences, which have worsened substantially over the past decade.
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Ontario’s school boards consider students to be absent in some form if they miss 10 per cent or more of their classes. That’s a threshold where additional discipline is triggered.
Back in the 2017-18 school year, roughly 60 per cent of students in grades 9 to 12 were attending class at that level. That figure has fallen sharply to just 40 per cent in the 2024-25 year.
The decline worsened substantially when students returned to class after the pandemic. In 2021-22, 53 per cent of students in grades 9 to 12 were meeting the attendance requirements, which fell again to 36 per cent in 2022-23.
The following year saw a rate of 40.5 per cent, falling again to 40.2 per cent last year.
Attendance rates appear to worsen with age, a trend which remains broadly the same since the 2017-18 year. Figures for last year show that 46 per cent of students in Grade 9 met the threshold, 41 per cent in Grade 10 and 39 per cent in Grade 11.
Just 33 per cent of students in Grade 12 were in class 90 per cent of the time or more often.
Calandra said he was concerned the current assessment system allowed kids to skip class and still get high marks, while failing to acknowledge those who attend every lesson.
“One hundred per cent of their mark is based on coursework, so students can pop in and out as they like and their mark was not impacted at all,” he said on Tuesday.
“And at the same time, some kids were working really, really hard and there was no way to acknowledge their hard work as part of their marks.”
The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation said the change was “low-hanging fruit” and said the government should make broader investments to encourage students to spend more time in school.
“I would rather that the government funded the system properly so that we wouldn’t be seeing these gaps in attendance at all,” Malin Leahy, vice president with the union, said.
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