NT government sticks to hardline school policies despite attendance slipping

The Northern Territory government says it will continue to clamp down on students skipping school, despite new data indicating its hardline truancy approach is not yielding results.

Since coming to power in August 2024, the Country Liberal Party (CLP) government has spent more than $20 million on policies including deploying truancy officers to get kids back to class.

However, NT Education Department data from term one this year shows Aboriginal school attendance rates, from preschool to high school, dropped to an average of 57 per cent, down more than 2 per cent on the year prior and a 10-year low.

Of all the NT regions, the lowest average attendance rate was in the Barkly, which was sitting at 41.7 per cent.

NT Education Minister Jo Hersey has blamed the dismal data on a period of significant natural disasters across the jurisdiction, including severe and widespread flooding late in 2025 and early this year.

However, the downward trend of NT attendance rates extends far beyond that period.

Department data shows student attendance rates across the NT have steadily declined over the past 10 years, dropping from 81 per cent in 2015 to 72 per cent in 2025 — the lowest in Australia.

For Aboriginal students specifically, attendance has declined at four times the rate of non-Aboriginal students, dropping from 67.4 per cent in 2015 to 54.7 per cent in 2025.

Despite the figures continuing to fall under the CLP's watch, Ms Hersey appeared to be sticking by the government's truancy policies, including placing parents of recidivist truant students on income management, handing out compliance notices and having uniformed workers go around remote communities to enforce school attendance.

"The CLP Government will continue to hold parents to account for school attendance," she said in a statement.

"Since coming to government, I haven't stopped talking about the importance of parents getting their children to school.

"Parents have been warned loud and clear — get your children to school or you will be referred to income management.

"Every school in the NT at the start of this upcoming term will have a mandatory attendance plan, with extra support for disengaged students returning to school."

School board leader says policies don't work

Josie Skelton, who has worked in Territory education for nearly 15 years, said she believed the government's truancy initiatives were failing to revive attendance rates.

Ms Skelton, who is the chief executive of the Groote Education Board in the NT's east, said part of the problem was the lack of permanence of the truancy officers — colloquially known as "the blackshirts" — that come into communities to try to enforce attendance.

"Everyone knows the blackshirts are coming, everyone talks about it, families come into our office and get uniforms, or they come in with the truancy officer on that day," she said.

"They go to school the next day, the truancy officers fly off for another term, and the kids don't go into school. It doesn't work."

She also said she did not believe threatening families with fines was having an effective impact.

Labor MP for Lingiari, Marion Scrymgour, who is also the federal government's Special Envoy for Remote Communities, said she wanted proven community-led solutions introduced.

"Young people need culture and identity; what is important to that young person needs to wrap around and make them strong," she said.

She said she believed there was a reluctance in the NT government to accept solutions from within remote Aboriginal communities, such as bolstering bilingual language programs.

"I think that it's almost like they're afraid to because they don't want to be accused of being woke," she said.

"Well it's not about being woke, it's about caring about what that child's life trajectories are going to be beyond childhood to adulthood."

Ms Hersey told a recent NT budget estimates hearing that "evaluation is ongoing" of the truancy policies, but could not point to any specific evidence about whether they worked.