Kindergarten Absences Have More Than Doubled

Missing school has quietly become normal, and it starts earlier than most parents would guess. New Canadian research puts chronic absence in kindergarten at more than double its pre-pandemic level, among children who are five.

The four items below sit in different corners of the same school year, absence patterns, staffing at the principal's office, screen habits, and a subject nobody scores consistently, but they point at the same thing: strain that builds up quietly, well before it shows up anywhere a parent would notice without asking.

Chronic Absence in Canadian Kindergarten Has More Than Doubled

Researchers at McMaster University's Offord Centre for Child Studies, led by Caroline Reid-Westoby with Eric Duku, Ashley Gaskin and Magdalena Janus, published findings in PLOS ONE on June 15, 2026, drawing on more than 500,000 Canadian kindergarten children across eight provinces and territories (PLOS ONE, 2026). They compared a pre-pandemic group who attended between 2017 and 2020 against a post-pandemic group from 2020 to 2023.

Chronic absence, defined as missing at least 10 percent of school days, rose from 17.7 percent of kindergarteners before COVID-19 to 41.3 percent afterwards (PLOS ONE, 2026). The more interesting finding is who is now missing school. In the post-pandemic group, chronic absence was linked to lower, not higher, odds of developmental vulnerability on the standard classroom assessment, and a larger share of frequent absentees lived in higher-income neighbourhoods than before 2020. Missing kindergarten has become common enough that it no longer tracks the family circumstances researchers used to associate it with.

The finding matters most for what it implies about habit. Attendance patterns are being set before a child can read, which makes the early grades the easiest time to build a steady attendance routine.

Canadian Principals Are Running on Unmanageable Stress, a National Survey Finds

People for Education, working with Wilfrid Laurier University's Centre for Leading Research in Education and principal associations across the country, published the pilot results of its new Annual Canadian School Survey on June 17, 2026. The sample was 456 public school principals, 404 English and 52 French, who responded between October 2025 and January 2026, weighted toward Ontario and Manitoba, with Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia underrepresented (People for Education, 2026). Nine in ten principals said their work makes a genuine positive difference. More than half said they do not have the resources to do the job properly, and described their own stress as unmanageable (People for Education, 2026).

The specific pressures are concrete. Nearly half of principals reported daily or weekly shortages of teaching staff, and almost two-thirds reported daily or weekly shortages of educational assistants or office staff. Nearly half said their school sees daily or weekly incidents of physical violence, and about a third reported weekly psychological violence such as bullying or harassment. More than a third of principals personally receive threatening or intimidating messages from parents at least monthly, and only a quarter said they never experience a hostile parent interaction at all (People for Education, 2026). One elementary principal described the daily reality to researchers as "metaphorical fires everywhere... going from one fire to the next."

This is a pilot year, not a census, and People for Education is careful to frame it as the first wave of a survey meant to track these pressures annually rather than a definitive national count. It is still the most concrete recent read on what the adults running a school are absorbing before a single lesson happens. For a family, the practical takeaway is not alarm, it is context: a school working through a genuine staffing and resource squeeze has less slack to catch one specific child's gap early, which is exactly the kind of targeted attention outside academic support is built to provide.

Does Screen Time Affect School Performance? An Ontario Study Says Yes

A team with the TARGet Kids! primary care research network, led by Xuedi Li with senior authors including Catherine Birken at The Hospital for Sick Children and Jonathon Maguire at Unity Health Toronto, published in JAMA Network Open on October 10, 2025 (JAMA Network Open, 2025). The study followed 3,322 Grade 3 children and 2,084 Grade 6 children recruited through Ontario primary care between 2008 and 2023, then linked their parent-reported screen time to their actual provincial assessment results.

Every additional hour of daily screen time was associated with roughly 9 percent lower odds of reaching a higher achievement band in Grade 3 reading, 9 percent lower odds in Grade 3 math, and 10 percent lower odds in Grade 6 math (JAMA Network Open, 2025). Screen time was measured young, at an average age of about five and a half for the Grade 3 group. Television and other digital media showed the clearest pattern.

Two caveats are worth keeping in view. This is an association measured across thousands of children, not a prediction about any individual one, and the researchers were careful to frame it that way. It also does not distinguish a child reading on a tablet from a child watching videos for three hours. What it does offer a parent is an unusually concrete reason to look at the hours rather than the content, at an age when habits are still easy to shift. For a child who already avoids books, our piece on what to do when your child hates reading suggests practical first steps.

Writing Is the Core Subject That Escapes Attention

The Hechinger Report published an analysis on August 6, 2026 by Jackie Mader on why writing has gone largely untracked in the United States, noting that no national test of elementary students' writing has been published since 2002 (Hechinger Report, 2026). Vicki McQuitty, who directs the Maryland Writing Project at Towson University, told Hechinger that most teachers never received formal training in teaching writing, so instruction varies widely from classroom to classroom.

One district changed that deliberately. Janet Merrill, literacy coordinator for Douglas County schools outside Denver, adopted a structured writing program that gives teachers specific strategies for how students plan and organize a piece, rather than leaving it to instinct. Within three years the district saw improvement across multiple subjects, not writing alone, and middle school teachers noticed stronger writing arriving from elementary school (Hechinger Report, 2026).

Ontario is better placed than that account suggests, because EQAO does publish provincial writing results: in 2024-2025, 65 percent of Grade 3 students and 85 percent of Grade 6 students met the provincial standard in writing (EQAO, 2025). What Ontario shares with the American picture is the attention gap rather than the data gap. Reading and math results drive policy and headlines, Grade 3 writing sits 9 points below Grade 3 reading, and writing instruction still varies considerably between classrooms. If your child's writing is the weak spot, it is the area where a specific, teachable method tends to help fastest. Our guide on how to tell if your child needs a tutor lists the early signs worth watching.

What This Means for Families and Teachers

Put together, these four items describe a system carrying more strain than a report card shows. Absence habits are forming earlier than most parents would guess. The adults running the building are telling researchers, in a first-of-its-kind national survey, that the resources have not kept pace with what is being asked of them. Early screen time shows up measurably in Grade 3 and Grade 6 results. Writing quality, the skill that carries nearly every other subject, is tracked but rarely acted on with the same urgency as reading and math.

None of that requires a dramatic response at home. The useful move is narrower: notice which of these four pressure points actually touches your child, whether that is a shaky attendance habit, a screen routine that has crept up, or writing that lags behind everything else, and get a clear read on it early rather than waiting for a report card to confirm it. Connect Education works exclusively with certified teachers who hold a professional teacher certificate in good standing, matched to a specific grade and a specific gap rather than general homework help. If you want to know which component is the real problem before you decide anything, you can book a free 15-minute assessment or browse certified tutors.