To think the Ofsted inspector who blames WFH parents for low attendance is probably just resentful?

I wonder if the guy has any investments in commercial properties? I feel like a lot of the anti WFH stuff is being pushed because there’s a lot of rich people losing money.

I can assure you I do doubt my parenting all the time, and certainly don't get everything right.

Particularly when DH and I were having a full on physical fight with our 5'9" daughter to get her in the car and stop her from getting out and running away. Which is what school wanted us to do every day.

I wasn’t teacher bashing, I was providing an insight into the general consensus. You’re welcome to ignore it, and only see your viewpoint. But (as a teacher) you’ll never get to the bottom of the mindset if you don’t firstly see the other side.

For what it’s worth I don’t think this way at all, I think teachers should’ve been prioritised for vaccines and I fully support the argument that schools should have fresh air filtration systems.

But as a teacher, you surely can see that these things have helped harvest a mindset that attendance is optional / not important.

so hardly loads, then id want to know how many had studyed upto date research on the issue, vs how many just made an auto assumption based of their own views without any research

This made me chuckle

What was the most stressful part for me (apart from seeing DD's distress at trying to go to school, and depression when she could not) was constantly being threatened with fines and court action, even though every single day I would email the school, we were trying so hard to get her into school every day , and we were getting her all the help we could and we attended all meetings with school and the local authority they asked us to. DH and I could potentially lose our jobs with a criminal record and we had done absolutely nothing wrong.

It's not nuanced at all imho. There's bizarre thoughts and opinions, unless you think that's nuanced?

@jellyfishperiwinkle trouble is, we never doubt our parenting. I am not the most natural parent and I have made mistakes. I can admit to that. And I think school refusal does is often related to our parenting, as well as in individual children. My son loves school. That doesn't mean that I didn't play a role in my daughter's school avoidance.

@jellyfishperiwinkle I am on that page, as we still have ongoing issues off and on. Like I said, no one can judge parents doing what they need to go to survive. If that's letting your child stay home whilst you log on, or take your child in every day in the hope that something piques her interest enough to get her through the door. Both choices are dependent on your situation.
If I lost my job, I would have lost our home, which is the home to both my children. We would have had to move to temporary accommodation, probably a BnB for a period of time. My Dd would have been severely dsyregulated by all of this. So it was the lesser of two evils to get her in every day.
However if I had been able to WFH, then I would have been very tempted to let her stay home, for my own mental health.
But I have no doubt that had I done that, we would not have an EHCP and she would be out of school now.

I worked from home long before the pandemic. DD1 never had any attendance issues. DD2 didn't have any attendance issues before 2020 and starting secondary school during a pandemic. Go figure. School was the problem, not home, not my parenting and not our work patterns.

There's probably two factors - that COVID undermined a lot of parents opinion of the school system, and not allowing kids to attend for the majority of an academic year has meant that parents see attendance as less important than it was before. Coupled with the fact for a lot of people, a sick day for your kid no longer means you have to take a day off work when WFH, then it probably has contributed to increased absences.

Nothing to do with WFHers being lazy though, as you say - I can't imagine anything worse than having to WFH with a child under my feet all day. But if it's a sick child in bed all day that I just have to make a few drinks and meals for, it would be more doable than taking an unpaid day off would've been in the past.

its down to the individual themselves to learn thats why i used Einstein, etc you can lead a horse to water, plus if they are not focused at home how will being at school be any different

If you go onto the Facebook group Not Fine in School you will see examples of parents desperately trying anything to get their kids to go to school whether they are single parents or not and whether their job is home based or not. And many lose their jobs because of school refusal in spite of their best efforts. I'm glad you were able to keep your daughter in school, but it doesn't mean those methods you describe work for everyone or that they haven't bothered trying.

@Cupcakes2035 and how does a parent nurture that whilst working full time from home? Plonking a child infront of a text book would rarely work with the majority of children.

they all had to start somewhere, no one is auto a genius, it takes will power, Self discipline to focus on your studies, and commitment

@Kiwi83 but where would the teacher send them if you didn’t WFH?

Do you think Einstein was a typical child? 😂

The last thing I need when WFH are the blooming kids there. Mine go into school regardless of how ill they are, their teacher can send them home if needed 🤷‍♀️

Whilst it may not be the main cause of low school attendance, it’s pretty obvious that it’s easier to have a child at home if parents WFH vs working away from home.

If at 7am your child says they don’t feel well, it’s a hell of a lot easier to say “OK but you’ll have to be quiet while I work” than to figure out who the hell will look after your kid while you travel 30 miles away to an office for 8 hours!

Every working parent has done the hopeful calpol thing, then anxiously jumped each time their phone rings. If you worked from home, you’d have less need to dose them up and send them in.

they may agree on the basis of how it sounds unless those that agree have done and read the research, plus excatly how many people is that to get the 70% because eg 10 people asked 7 agree = 70%

I do think there is a correlation. This is not to blame parents, but we all have to work to live these days. I used to have to sit with my DD for almost three hours sometimes when she was too anxious to go into school. It was sometimes 1 hour, sometimes 2. It made work almost impossibly and if I didn't have a flexible employer I would have lost my job. I had a policy that I would always get her into the school building. This meant sometimes she would cry the whole time walking there.
It was a hugely exhausting and stressful situation. But she did get over it, and comes in every day now.
I don't think that the children who didn't make it in were any more or less distressed or anxious than my daughter. The parents just couldn't sit there for six hours a week trying to get their child back to baseline in the school reception area.
I could have let her stay at home. I could have logged onto a morning meeting as many do, called school and said that she was too upset to come in. And there are many reasons why parents might do that. They might lose their jobs/ homes if they don't log into those morning meetings. They might have their own health or mental health reasons for why they can't sit there each day whilst their child cries, screams, hits you, bites you, runs away and headbangs.
But I couldn't lose my job. I am a sole parent, only breadwinner. And my job has to be done in a hospital. If I could WFH.
My motivation to get my daughter in was fuelled by my need to get to work every day to earn money for us to live. If I had a WFH job, I would have been able to let her stay home. But would I have ever got her back in?
The parents who let their children stay home who I stay in contact with, by and large their children are not in education at all now.

some people think the schooling system is the crowning jewel, you can learn better, quicker and smarter from home (granted not everyone but a good majority) do people forget the old days of Einstein, franklin, da Vinci etc teaching themselves

I like a hybrid work pattern, but I tend to do more office days than home days now. While wfh I hate that I really ought to do things like laundry and prefer being ‘at work’ for better sharing of the household load (I don’t have less to do just because I am at home). I do like to wfh when I have lots of quiet work to do as I’m much more productive.