School Attendance Soars to 64.2 Percent, a Triumph by the Standards We Just Picked

The Government announced that regular school attendance has reached 64.2 percent, the highest Term 2 result since 2016. The announcement carries the tone of a championship win, which takes some doing for a statistic confirming that roughly one in three students is not regularly at school.

The framing is doing heavy lifting here. “Highest since 2016” is accurate, and it is also the sentence you construct when the raw number will not survive on its own. Attendance is up 5.8 percentage points on last year, which is genuine progress, and progress toward a figure that would have been treated as a crisis in the year now serving as the benchmark.

Nearly 200,000 more students are attending regularly than in 2022, and that matters. It is simply being announced in the register usually reserved for full marks, when the mark in question is 64.2, rounded up to celebration.