To think that mass non-attendance at school is COVID-related?

No. I know 4 children who have barely been to school in the last couple of years.
All of them struggled for years before covid, requests for MH support ignored, autism assessments turned down.
When they realised that during Covid they felt better and "normal" it made going back to school unbearable. They continued to be ignored when they asked for help going back after covid. There is no CAMHS support and schools are less flexible than they used to be. No wonder so many kids have crashed and burnt.
This could have been prevented by (gasp) listening to the parents pre-covid and then putting support in place when going back to school.

In my experience there are two reasons: 1) the crumbling NHS means that children’s health issues are not being addressed 2) Academy chains - some academy chains are very rigid, almost corporate-like environments. This lack of adaptability takes away autonomy from teachers and makes it difficult to make adaptations for students. Teachers are leaving in droves: school avoidance is going through the roof.

edit: actually there are a few other issues too- like the very dry curriculum with less time for creative subjects, the lack of break time/outside play.

I think there is a loss of resilience among families since Covid too. Low employment, low wages, COL crises etc have made it stressful for parents, leading to financial difficulties, health and mental health difficulties (again, not helped by our crumbling NHS). These problems have an affect on children. Suddenly, less family time because everyone is working, parents have less time to help with school work. Parents are more stressed when around their children and may no longer be able to rely on family for help and support because family are also stressed, broke, unhealthy and overworked. Less holidays and relaxation time, less money for enrichment and hobbies - the things that help kids regulate and learn so many skills like self-discipline, self-esteem, resilience.

Many parents are millennials - the generation that were told that if we went to school, worked hard and got good marks we would do well. A lot of us did those things and got stuck in minimum wage jobs anyway. We know that education and working hard doesn’t pay off, so we are less likely to push our children into school (especially when all we hear about schools is how awful behaviour is, how horrible the general environment is, how stringent the rules are - silly uniform rules, rules about eye contact and going to the toilet etc).

That may apply in England but doesn’t account for the rest of the UK which are seeing similar absence patterns.

Yes, it bemuses me that people think something as seismically significant as covid wouldn't still have effects a couple of years on. Remember that restrictions only ended in 2022. It is not much time at all.

Covid is still around, bad flu seasons, chronic illnesses in some DC. Mental health is another issue for others. I think attendance and missing days percentage should be tagged for reasons. It seems the data is not used in any meaningful way when reported by media or government.

Yes, but I think a lot of it is because of wider effects like the extended waiting lists, increased levels of anxiety in children with too much access to the internet, more parents WFH and able to keep children at home for more minor illnesses, and a break in the experience that every child just has to go to school.

The NHS has not caught up on waiting lists since 2020. If child has health or development issues, it's many, many months or years to get the appointments and go through diagnistic and support processes. This greatly exacerbates persistant absence which has the greatest impact on absence data. It took DS2 6 months to be seen "urgently" in paediatrics when his asthma was out of control and regularly affecting his attendance.

Many children with additional needs don't have appropriate school places because demand totally outstrips supply. This triggers persistant absence.

Families settling for 98%-99% attendance rather than insistantly sending under-the-weather children in is not statistically a major issue.

Chronic under-resourcing of education, health and support services is the major issue. What the lockdowns did was stall provision and cause backlogs that the systems couldn't catch-up on.

Also data systems have changed increasing usage of "unauthorised" so data is not like for like.

DS2 was "unauthorised" for vomiting and following the school's 48 hour policy because I didn't try to waste mine or the GP's time to get an appointment to prove he had a temporary, minor, self-limiting illness. After a serious asthma phase (including 999 from school) and emergency surgery for another issue, school expected medical evidence for every ailment, and the GP does not have spare appointments for that kind of trivia... or indeed the escalating asthma in the first place 🤦‍♀️

YANBU

Too many people are stupid enough to think that ‘the government didn’t care about education then so it can’t be important enough for me to worry about now’.

Completely ignoring the fact the we know the detrimental effect lockdowns had on children’s education.

There are multiple reasons and yes, covid influenced several of them.

There are some DC who have ongoing health issues. And there's also been a change in the social contract regarding school attendance. That one isn't going away any time soon.

'Because of covid' can also mean ramifications, not just the behaviours then. E.g. some children will also have seen parents' disabled by long covid.

It's the same in other areas of life, I'm sure. E.g. church attendance, volunteering - all of these are down among the previous cohort. It only takes one or two 'key people' to become disabled/die (both of which happened in the groups I volunteered in) for everyone else to slowly withdraw.

Are people still going to be blaming covid in 100 years? No i dont notice it because of covid

And to add to my point. Prior to covid I would never have taken my kids out to go on holiday. Now I will.

It is not the fear of getting sick. It is the belief that school is optional. Kids were excluded from schools for months on end. Why would they now thing its important to go...that's the issue.

Having worked in schools and with young people over many years, the reasons for non attendance are varied and complex and they always have been. Covid has added to it, but it’s not the root cause.

I think it's due to more parents WFH.

My mum had to be on the train to work at 8.43, so everyone was dressed, breakfasted and out of the house by 8.05. If we were too ill to go to school, we couldn't be left in the house alone, so it was a massive pain for her - changing meetings, dealing with stroppy clients, placating arsey bosses. So the expectation was that we took 2 aspirin, put a tissue and some throat sweets in our pocket and off we went.

If you work from home and just need to log on at 9, getting everyone dressed and out is not so much of an imperative and might even be a right pain. If you've got a child with a sniffly nose, it's easier to say 'Stay in bed with the tablet, dear and I'll pop up and see you after I've finished my first couple of hours work.'

If you're a teenager who is finding school stressful, a home with the heating on, wifi running and mum/dad in the home office upstairs is a comforting place to be.

I think that for many people Covid caused us to look around critically at daily routines. It’s a bit like the boiling frog analogy you do all the things you do every day cause you are too busy to look around and take stock, more and more gets piled on and you just cope because it’s what you do and you have to keep putting one foot in front of another.

If DS was ill he went to school unless his leg was hanging off, exactly as I was told by my parents and they were told by my grandparents.

Covid caused most people to re-evaluate the ‘norms’ I’m not soft with DB and his attendance last year was 97. Something percent, but I do keep him home if he has a bad cold (not a sniffle) or a bad stomach, whereas before I might have told him to suck it up.

Similarly I would have struggled into work with the same, but now I would work from home or take a day off instead, and I think we’re all better for it.

I agree with PP that in some ways schools were more pleasant under Covid restrictions, less noisy and chaotic and I can see that for neurodivergent kids that might have been a blessing and getting back to pre-covid norms could be very challenging.

it’s also quite well documented that children’s development was hampered and behavioural issues seem more prevalent now. Coupled
with the pressure cooker effect of stats, league tables etc. I think a combination of factors have made schools less pleasant places to be overall.

School attendance officer here. Covid is definitely still having an impact attendance has not gone back to pre covid levels many parents think it was OK to keep them off during covid so still ok now. Attendance levels for children on PP is much lower than non PP children

Let's wait until the war starts and see what effect that has.

I think it's partly COVID and partly the triple whammy of social media giving vulnerable kids no respite from school, a hugely overstuffed and deliberately difficult curriculum that was only fully rolled out in 2018 which does not suit many neurodivergent or less academically able kids, and the ubiquitousness of academy trusts using ridiculously punitive and non ND friendly behavioural systems.

A huge preponderance of kids with EBSA are autistic, and most have years of "surviving not thriving" in school before they stop being able to attend.

It was a perfectly reasonable question. Scotland is in the UK too, but returns to school around now, before much of the rest of the UK.

You didn't give the information in your OP about what you were basing your question on. It therefore isn't being obtuse to ask where you are and what you meant. Nobody is telepathic.

There's quite a lot of judgement there from you, based on a tiny snippet of information! You know nothing about their ages, frequency of being ill, academic ability, their own attitudes to being off, their ambitions, literally nothing, so why you think they're going to be unable to get a job is baffling!

Covid was definitely a catalyst in my house. Then compounded by both my girls getting ASD diagnosis's in high school, poor behaviour by classmates (fights/shouting/loud non compliance), large high schools being a completely inappropriate environment for them both, senco's overwhelmed and unable to do their jobs due to workload, the knowledge that they could study online...