One third of schoolchildren in Chile miss one month or more of classes during the school year, resulting in chronic absenteeism that affects both their learning and their psychosocial development. The Ministry of Education has launched the #EveryDayCounts campaign to make this problem visible and motivate families and students to attend classes. In kindergarten education, the situation is even more critical. It is estimated that over 65% of prekindergarten and kindergarten children have chronic absenteeism every year.
The Un Buen Comienzo Improvement Network (UBC) is made up of around 90 municipal schools from 12 municipalities in the O'Higgins Region that work collaboratively to improve the learning of kindergarten children. A central focus of their work is to reduce chronic absenteeism, since it is essential for children to attend classes so that they can learn and develop properly.
Each school in this network implements a series of strategies provided by the Foundation that have been tested in different contexts, including general strategies for all children in the class and specific strategies for those children with repeated absences, in order to reverse their situation. These strategies are tested in their classrooms, measure the results and share those that systematically prove to be effective.
Within the specific strategies, a key strategy has been the formation of Attendance Committees, with the participation of the school principal, classroom team and parents. This committee detects children at risk of chronic absenteeism, identifies the causes of absenteeism and proposes actions to restore the situation of these children, following up to measure their effectiveness.
Among the general strategies, the children's favorite is the visit of Super Attendance, a superhero who comes to the school and explains to them the importance of attending classes to acquire learning, promoting his motto: "You have to be there to win! Attending classes is to earn learning".
With all this work, the UBC Improvement Network schools achieved in 2018 to decrease chronic absenteeism to 35% and for this year they set even more ambitious goals.
