Only 4 out of 10 Ontario high school students meeting government attendance target

Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra explains the tabled bill that would see sweeping changes to the education system.

Only about 40 per cent of Ontario high school students met the attendance threshold set by the province during the 2024/2025 academic year, according to data from the Ford government.

The new statistics come days after Education Minister Paul Calandra announced that the Ford government would introduce legislative changes that would make attendance count for up to 10 to 15 per cent of the final grades for secondary school students.

The data, provided to CTV News, shows that in the 2024/2025 academic year the percentage of secondary school students who met the threshold of 90 per cent attendance was only 40.2 per cent.

Grade 12 students had the lowest attendance with just 33.3 per cent of that group meeting the government’s threshold while Grade 11 students also languished behind (38.7 per cent) younger students. Grade 9 students had higher attendance numbers overall but less than half of them (45.7 per cent) met the province’s target.

“What I’m hearing from a lot of educators, look the reality is that since 100 per cent of their mark is based on coursework, they actually don’t have to come to class, right? There’s no consequence for them coming to school or not,” Calandra said Wednesday.

“So they choose not to come and a lot of educators said it’s unfair for those students who are there every single day, they work really hard, they participate. And this kind of levels the playing field, but it’ll get them back into school, because there has to be consequences for not attending. There has to be consequences for bad behavior.”

Earlier this week, Calandra expressed frustration with school attendance numbers that he said were increasingly making it difficult for teachers to manage their classrooms.

He said that the numbers were already “creeping up” prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and have worsened since then.

The data shows that the proportion of secondary school students meeting the government’s attendance threshold was nearly 60 per cent as of 2018.

However, the number has steadily dropped since then. It reached a low of 36 per cent coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022/2023 and hovered around 40 per cent the two academic years following that.

Meanwhile, in the four academic years since the pandemic elementary schools have experienced rising attendance numbers. Across the board, attendance levels were higher prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Liberal education critic John Fraser criticized Premier Doug Ford’s government for not investigating the number of absences on Wednesday, saying they’re “not looking into it, not studying it.”

“Their answer is, you know what? The easiest thing to do is, we can penalize kids. We don’t know why they’re doing it, but we’ll just penalize,” Fraser said about the government’s approach on Wednesday.

“I think the government’s failing the kids, and maybe they don’t want that answer because class size is too big.”

With files from the Canadian Press and CP24’s Joshua Freeman.