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School absence - it's time to attend to the problem
Why a culture of fear and a failure of education is keeping kids at home
According to school census data, nearly 1 in 4 pupils (22.5%) were persistently absent - missing 10 per cent or more of class time - in the 2021/22 academic year. (The experimental official statistics released for 2022/23 suggest nothing has changed.) This compares with just 10% in the 2018/19 academic year. The gap has considerably widened with attendance worse still for disadvantaged children and those with special educational needs. For disadvantaged pupils, eligible for free school meals, the figure was over a third (37.2 per cent) persistently absent.
It’s not as if the Department for Education are unaware of the problem. They have put on extensive - if online - training for schools on good practice and implementing the official attendance guidance. As well as rolling out so-called attendance hubs. The Commons Education Committee has, likewise, embarked on an Inquiry. Having come to the conclusion (rather later in the day for some of us) that ‘covid-19 is likely to have had a damaging effect on school attendance’.
Dame Rachel de Souza, children’s commissioner for England, states: ‘Of the 1.6 million pupils who were persistently absent in 2021/22, I calculate that 621,000 pupils were persistently absent due to illness alone and over 1 million pupils – 1,023,000 – were persistently absent for reasons other than just illness’. She has also noted a worrying trend associated with the response to the pandemic. Telling the Commons Education Select Committee: ‘Parents are at home on Fridays. We've had evidence from kids: 'Well, you know, mum and dad are at home - stay at home'.’
A representative from Essex Council, echoing this point, explained: ‘Anxiety and mental health concerns are one of the most significant drivers behind our recent increase in persistent/severe absence from school’. Contributing to ‘a significant growth in the cohort of children and families who struggle to leave their home’. In addition to increasing numbers keeping children at home for ‘minor ailments’, presenting a considerable challenge for a sector already struggling under resource pressures.
According to evidence given by the Local Government Association representative: ‘Some schools have managed these pressures by practices to influence which students are admitted or practices designed to manage children out of the school, such as the inappropriate use of attendance codes, part-time timetables, informal exclusions, off-rolling, and inappropriate use of permanent exclusion’.
Analysis from Lee Elliot Major and Andy Eyles at the London School of Economics draws out the concerning relationship between persistent absenteeism and a lack of attainment, particularly for the poorest pupils. This is also a particular concern with a third of GCSE studying 15 year olds persistently absent in England. ‘Perhaps most troubling of all’, say Major and Eyles, ‘some families appear to have lost their belief that attending school regularly is necessary for their children. Some parents are openly questioning whether the return to schooling is needed, given that results were so good last year, when many pupils were absent due to COVID.’
In the view of Russell Hobby, chief executive of Teach First: ‘the pandemic contributed to this - triggering a disengagement with school for some and increased mental health concerns’. For Doctor Jeffery Quaye, of the Aspirations Academies Trust, it ‘is at least in part a crisis of confidence in education’. Certainly, a pre-existing existential crisis about the purpose of education, and a growing estrangement from the task of transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next, made it much easier to close the schools during the pandemic. The virus, wrongly as it turned out, was presented as the greater threat to young people’s well-being and future.
The sector has a lot to answer for. And yet, the Department for Education is unable to admit to its own critical role in the making of this crisis. While not wrong to restate in its guidance to schools, the importance of attendance and the expectations placed on them and local authorities, the attendance problem isn’t going to be solved until it is acknowledged what caused it. No doubt there will need to be more legal interventions to ensure parents recognise their responsibility to ensure their children attend.
But more Parenting Contracts, Education Supervision Orders, Attendance Prosecutions, Parenting Orders and Fixed Penalty Notices, will not in themselves solve the problem. It is too entrenched for that. If teachers or the educational establishment don’t seem to value education as much as they should, we shouldn’t be surprised when parents don’t either. Still, as Quaye says, the education crisis is only part of the explanation.
You might have expected parents to be angry - at the schools, at the teachers unions, at the government - for denying their kids an education, not to mention making it impossible to work with the children at home. But, with a few notable exceptions like Us For Them, this wasn’t the case. People were scared. They were told, by those same institutions, to be scared.
It’s important not to underestimate how the failure of many working in education to defend education, and the exploitation of a culture of fear, laid the ground for the closure of schools during the pandemic and for the attendance crisis that followed. It is only by addressing both of these things - the fear and the failure - that the crisis in our classrooms will be properly attended to.