By Adam Teperski and Ilya Klauzner
 

To examine whether changes in school attendance before and after COVID-19 were associated with changes in rates of youth crime in New South Wales (NSW). METHOD We linked Local Government Area (LGA) level measures of school attendance for Year 1 to 10 students from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) to data on legal actions involving persons under the age of 17 from the NSW Police Force’s Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS). Our analysis dataset included observations from January 2013 to December 2023 in Semester 1 and Term 3 for 120 NSW LGAs. We first examined trends in school attendance and trends in the rate of persons aged 10-16 legally proceeded against by police per 100,000 young people. We then implemented a fixed effects regression to estimate the association between school attendance and youth legal action rates. This method allowed us to control for both observable LGA level factors that varied over time and unobserved LGA-specific factors that were constant over time. We separately estimated the relationship between school attendance and the rate of youth legal actions for different subsets of our data.

This includes different crime types (i.e., all crime, violent crime and property crime), for observations in 2019 vs. 2023, and for LGAs located in Greater Sydney vs. Regional NSW. RESULTS From 2014 to 2019, average school attendance rates acrossNSW were stable at around 90%, before falling to 86% in 2022 and recovering to 88% by 2023. Overall rates of youth crime per 100,000 young people declined from 1,719 in 2017 to 1,205 in 2023, despite a slight increase in 2021. Rates of youth property crime and violent crime were both stable pre COVID-19 but increased post COVID-19 (from 222.5 in 2019 to 256.9 in 2023, and 177.2 in 2019 to 206.5 in 2023, respectively). The results from the fixed effects regression suggested no significant relationship between the average school attendance rate and the overall rate of youth crime from January 2013 to December 2023. Similar results were found for property and violent offences. When focusing specifically on observations in 2019 and 2023, school attendance rates were not associated with any changes in rates of youth crime. This was true: 1) across all LGAs included in our sample; 2) for LGAs in Greater Sydney versus Regional NSW and 3) across different crime categories (total/violent/property offences). While the method employed in this study was able to control for multiple factors related to school attendance and rates of youth crime, we cannot exclude the possibility that unobserved time-varying factors may be influencing our results. CONCLUSION Decreases in school attendance in the post-COVID period were not associated with changes in youth crime rates in NSW. These findings reflect an associative relationship rather than a causal effect and should be interpreted with this limitation in mind.