A South Auckland principal has welcomed MPs inquiry into rising student absences .
Official figures in May showed more than 60,000 students classified as chronically absent, missing at least three days of school every fortnight, and almost 40 per cent of pupils not going to school regularly.
School attendance has been dropping since 2015 across "all regions, all ethnicities, all deciles and all year levels", according to Parliament's education committee.
Rowandale Primary School principal Karl Vasau told Breakfast attendance was a "huge problem", but it did not always come down to students simply wagging school.
He described parents having no petrol in their vehicles to drop their kids at school, no food, and family emergencies.
"The big one for us is the sickness in relation to the conditions they're living in," he said.
Vasau said the school had been working hard to make it easier for its families, by providing breakfast and lunch, which is "one less worry for families".
Since an overhaul of the Ministry of Education-funded Attendance Service in 2013, Vasau said a lot of schools had allocated their own funding to truancy.
He said he would "love more money to help us" around truancy, so the school could have a person dedicated to connecting with families to get to the bottom of why their children were absent.
The Government has announced it will review the Attendance Service, with the aim of having a new model in place by the start of 2022.
Currently, service providers contracted by the ministry to help return children to school say they are underfunded, with the $9.7 million allocated annually only reaching 20,000 students.
Overall, Vasau said he was pleased the Government had made "some nice noises" around student absences.
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