Threatening families with fines and court action does nothing to help children who cannot attend school. It may actively push them further away from the classroom.
That is the central argument from School Can’t Australia, a peer support organisation for families navigating chronic non-attendance. The group issued a public statement on 20 October 2026 calling for a national policy reset.
The group, led by director Tiffany Westphal, is urging federal, state, and territory governments to act. It wants punitive compliance measures replaced with cross-sector wraparound support. For school leaders, this means that compliance-focused attendance policies may be creating more problems than they solve.
“Carrots and sticks do not address the underlying reasons that students struggle to attend school,” Westphal said. “They simply ask parents and children to try harder to solve problems they don’t necessarily have the capacity to solve themselves.”
What does research say about punitive approaches to school non-attendance?
A 265-page OECD report published in 2026 found that school attendance problems are widespread and increasing across many education systems, particularly since the pandemic. Titled Every Day Counts: Understanding, Preventing and Responding to School Attendance Problems, it synthesised evidence from 45 education systems.
The OECD report found that punitive and compliance-based measures such as fines may produce short-term results but cannot durably reduce absence on their own. It also warned that enforcement-heavy responses risk deepening inequities for students already facing structural disadvantage.
A 2023 parliamentary research paper on school refusal by Dr Shannon Clark reached similar conclusions. It found no evidence that fines or court orders improve individual attendance outcomes. The paper also warned that authoritarian approaches can cause additional harm to students already in distress (Parliamentary Research Paper on School Refusal, 2023, pp. 16–17).
An AERO rapid literature review from January 2025 examined the evidence base for punitive legal measures. It identified just two relevant studies, and according to School Can’t Australia’s reading of the review, neither demonstrated strong effectiveness.
School leaders and educators working with families frequently encounter children with unmet disability support needs, trauma histories, and limited access to professional services. Westphal says the stories shared in the group’s peer support network consistently reflect these circumstances – not a lack of motivation.
The data behind the push
The national data tells the same story. Figures from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) shows students attended just 88.8% of school days in 2025.
School Can’t Australia argues that fines and legal threats force families to seek alternatives to mainstream education. This effectively boosts home education enrolments and can inadvertently improve attendance statistics in mainstream settings. Students most likely to need support have already exited the system.
A call for structural change
The organisation is calling on governments to take three concrete steps.
The first is providing cross-sector wraparound support for families whose child is experiencing school can’t.
The second is improving national data collection to better identify which students are most affected. Priority equity groups named include:
- students with disability
- First Nations students
- children in out-of-home care
- students with mental health conditions
- students from low socioeconomic or culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds
The third step is actioning the recommendations of the 2022 Australian Senate Inquiry into School Refusal and Related Matters. This includes the five additional actions recommended by Australian Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne.
For education decision-makers, the challenge is becoming harder to ignore. A 2023 Lonergan poll commissioned by the Greens surveyed more than 1,000 Australian parents. It found that two in five families had experienced school can’t at the time of the survey. That figure points to a systemic problem that whole-school approaches to student wellbeing are only beginning to address.
Sustainable improvements in attendance require genuine investment in the underlying conditions that shape a student’s ability to engage with school. A compliance framework that penalises families already carrying the heaviest load will not reduce school non-attendance sustainably.