As Ontario moves to make attendance and participation part of high school students' final marks, 91亚色 research offers context for what rising absenteeism may signal and why there may be no simple fix.
The study, co-authored by Faculty of Education's Robert Brown, adjunct professor, and Gillian Parekh, associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Inclusion, Disability and Education, along with collaborators from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and Wilfrid Laurier University, uses the 2011-12 academic year as a baseline to track absenteeism trends in TDSB schools through 2023-24.
One of the study's key findings complicates the common assumption that rising absenteeism is mainly a post-COVID issue. While student absence rates surged dramatically during and after the pandemic, the researchers found that roughly one-third of this increase was already underway before the pandemic.
"COVID took existing trends and put them on steroids," says Brown. "This isn't something just caused by COVID."
The study finds that absenteeism roughly doubled over the 12-year period, with increases evident across grades. Brown says attendance tends to be relatively high in kindergarten, stable through much of elementary school, then rises in senior elementary grades before accelerating in high school. More recent 2023-24 data show some decline in absence rates among early and mid-elementary students, but rates continued to climb across all secondary grades.
The pattern of who is most affected points to a deeper concern. Students with lower academic achievement tend to have higher absenteeism and experience the most severe effects from missing school.
"Absenteeism is yet another way that the more vulnerable students become even more vulnerable," says Brown.
Since COVID-19, the strength of the relationship between school absences and graduation has shifted. Before the pandemic, high absenteeism was more strongly associated with not graduating; in the post-COVID data, that association remains but is less pronounced. Brown says the finding points to unanswered questions about student engagement, learning and whether graduation rates capture the long-term effects of these attendance patterns.
"Absenteeism is often a proxy for academic engagement," says Brown. "It's a truism that schooling can't benefit students who aren't there."
The long-term stakes become clearer when looking beyond high school. A 2021 linking TDSB Grade 9 cohort data to post-secondary outcomes found that students who eventually graduated from university had an average Grade 9 absenteeism rate of about three per cent, compared with nearly 10 per cent among those who did not enter Canadian post-secondary education.
With roughly 70 to 80 per cent of students now continuing to post-secondary, according to Brown, the long-term effects of elevated post-COVID absence rates on this generation remain an open question on the implications beyond high school completion.
"For those students who managed to be more absent and still graduate, how will they do in post-secondary?" says Brown. "We simply don't know yet."
This trend also raises broader questions about how school attendance has been understood historically.
Brown's doctoral research traced absenteeism policy in Toronto schools back to the 1850s, a period when getting students into school was a central educational priority.
By the 1970s, attendance had largely disappeared as a policy concern. The current surge, however, reflects a broader international pattern across developed countries.
"No one has been much interested in absenteeism at the Ontario level for at least 50 years," says Brown. "This is the first time I'm aware of that it has become an important part of things at the provincial level."
That provincial attention comes in the form of the Putting Student Achievement First Act, which would require attendance and participation to count toward final marks 鈥 worth 15 per cent for Grades 9 and 10 and 10 per cent for Grades 11 and 12. Brown was careful about the extent to which the research directly shaped that decision.
"I know folks in [the ministry] were aware of the research, but whether those folks had any connection to the decision-makers, I have no idea,鈥 he says.
On the policy itself, Brown sees two sides.
He says there is little evidence that attaching marks to attendance, on its own, changes the behaviour of students who are already frequently absent. But he views the government's attention as a meaningful first step and sees potential value if the policy becomes part of a broader response.
With files from Mzwandile Poncana