School Absenteeism Assignment Sample

• Subject Name : Public health

School Absenteeism Observed in An Indigenous Group of The Population

The discussion will be covering school students who are mainly in high school, who are observed for absenteeism from school on a regular basis. According to van den Toren et al. (2019), absenteeism in school is mainly related to poor mental wellbeing, inadequate health behaviors and risk of substance abuse among adolescents. The increased absenteeism mainly observed due to a lack of educational programs as well as a lack of financial support in these settings.

The AIEF (Australian Indigenous Education Foundation) helps in providing the required care in these communities. The educational strategies can be in the form of the following:-

• Community-based awareness programs can be conducted to impart education about the importance of schooling for children. Parents can be encouraged to enroll children in schools with the help of various scholarship programs (Parsons, 2019).
• Regular parents and teacher's meetings can be conducted to help the parents keep close monitoring of their child's participation and involvement in various educational activities.
• Children can also be given out educational pamphlets as well as group activities that can be conducted to encourage the children to share their sides of the story. This will help in identifying the community based underlying factors that can be observed as an obstacle in their path to attain education.
• Culturally safe intervention programs can be thus, drafted keeping a close consideration for ethical and cultural concerns of these communities (Osborne, 2019).

Strategies that can be implemented include the following:

• The AIEF provides scholarship programs for these individuals. The parents can be made aware of these programs as it will tend to the financial supports required by these children. This will also be helpful in providing financial aid to the children who wish to pursue education but tend to drop out of school due to added financial burden (Frawley, 2017).
• Community based educational programs and interventions can be conducted with the help of funding received from the AIEF organization. This will be helpful in defining pathway programs as well, in accordance with the specific needs of the indigenous group of population.
• Interventions programs can also be formulated based on the factors that are attributing to the absenteeism of the children from the school. This will act as a promotional activity to increase the number of students getting enrolled in the schools and also completing their schooling without dropping the session in between.

References

Frawley, J., Larkin, S., & Smith, J. A. (2017). From policy to practice in higher education: Cross-cutting issues in Indigenous pathways, transition and participation. Indigenous Pathways, Transitions and Participation in Higher Education: From policy to practice, 273-277.

Osborne, S., Rigney, L. I., Benveniste, T., Guenther, J., & Disbray, S. (2019). Mapping boarding school opportunities for Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of Northern Territory. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 48(2), 162-178.

Parsons, A. (2019). Racial-ethnic identity and academic self-efficacy of indigenous Australian students studying on scholarships at independent Australian boarding schools—A systematic quantitative literature review. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 13(3), 146-164.

van den Toren, S. J., van Grieken, A., Mulder, W. C., Vanneste, Y., Lugtenberg, M., de Kroon, M. L., ... & Raat, H. (2019). School absenteeism, health-related quality of life [HRQOL] and happiness among young adults aged 16–26 years. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(18), 3321.

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