1 in 5 children missing school

Like @TheMotherSide I spend hours every week trying to get the needs of my two children with SEN met. Things are going pretty well for us now and attendance is good, but only because I've put in a huge amount of work, including taking my LA to tribunal. Six months ago we were were thinking of not sending my son to school until we managed to get a place at a school we thought would address his needs, as his mental health was suffering. We've managed to turn things round but the effort has been immense.

I laugh when I get messages from school saying we should arrange appointments outside of school hours. We've spent YEARS on waiting lists. Like I'm going to ring up and say oh please delay my son's appointment three months so that we don't miss school.

My DS is also in a specialist school and has a good deal of these life skills lessons.
Some are amazing (e.g. they have a small farm area and he learns things there we'd never be able to cover).
But quite a bit of it most families would naturally teach. I'd rather he did science in their lab which is never used than make cakes which we do at home.

Unmet SEN underpins a huge amount of EBSA.

Waiting lists for assessment stretch into years.

Lack of funding presents appropriate and timely support.

I am a professional working full time in an allied field. Advocating for my child's SEN to be met in an overwhelmed mainstream setting is like a part-time job, taking up hours each week with emailing, liaising, form-filling, meetings and appointment. I have the resources to do this but I fucking rage against this system which sees parents and families with less time, resources and capacity fall short of provision for their children simply because advocacy snd access is so impossible. For shame.

@Ponderingwindow wow how lucky are you to have had so much support for your child. If only this was the case for all children.

I don't have a source for this stat - its from an organisation that advocates for pupils with SEND. But they said that 80% of persistent absentees have either autusm or adhd.

Avoidance makes anxiety worse, so if during COVID children were able to not attend at all this became self perpetuating.

Most treatments for anxiety involve gradual exposure but I'm not sure schools know how to implement them properly (as they aren't mental health professionals).

Ironically the emphasis on mental health then makes other children worried about worrying - I get a bit worried -maybe I "have anxiety" - which makes the anxiety worse.

I speak as the parent of a child with SEN and social anxiety which we are working on very hard.

Are you waiting for CAMHS assesment? Which part of UK it is , if I may ask? Have you tried accessing Community Peadiatrician in the meantime? They usually are quicker to access

No this isn’t true.

When l was a secondary teacher l had to give a load of homework just to get through the syllabus,

In response to OP

Not on the streets, no.
At home, usually in her bed most of the day.
Occasionally doing something creative and some of the little school work that is set for her online.
On the 3 year waiting list for ADD/ASD assessment while I battle with her mainstream secondary school over her needing a placement at a SEND provision.
Worrying me sick as her beautiful soul and personality seemingly ebb away as she feels worthless and unable to learn like everyone else.
The suicidal thoughts have passed now she attends private counselling I can barely afford, but it's getting her through at the moment.

But in Germany they got load of homework. In UK the assumption is that a child should be able to meet expectations if they learn only at school

What can "collapse" is a specific school if the behaviour and educational expectatins are not met.
But if you look countrywide it is not like every single school is bad.
I am very sorry for your experience. Yes, the world is not fair and there are rich and poor not since today and associated with it access to better schools - private or because of postcode.

It's taken over a month for a whooping cough test to be sent for my child. Back and forth to the doctors with chest infection and sent back into school after the 48 hours of antibiotics. Missing school most weeks after being sick coughing so much. His attendance will have dipped. Not preventable. I have another child that's asthmatic and when it's not controlled they have to have time off due to hospitalisations. You have the attendance letters, e mails, meetings. It doesn't change the fact your children are genuinely unwell. I think they need to manage attendance differently.

I do homeschooling when my children are home and feel up to it. They have policies in place when they can't go in if they have been sick for 48-62 hours. I can't change that. So it's something I can do to help them not miss education. Due to my eldest asthma it makes things difficult as I do a zero hour contract as it's hard to predict.

Students and teachers, not students and children.

It's sad to see how many on here are so committed to misunderstanding school refusal.
I am just so relieved both of mine are now out of the school system, and have every sympathy for all those students and children still stuck in it.

another factor is that in many EU countries the school day is far shorter. Secondary aged kids can go home at 1:20pm in Germany. So it is not so full on. I am not sure attendance is higher either, I don't even know if they track it or have targets. I don't know where the data that attendance is higher elsewhere comes from. It's such an obsession here. A tick the box exercise. These scare stories of "if you child's attendance is below 95% they are of severe risk of underachievement!!!" are absolutely insane.

Try and assure someone else, you don't convince me in the slightest. There is a tipping point in any crisis and my area is already in crisis. There are no options available to my daughter.

People USED to move house and/or go private. Neither option feasible for most, certainly not for me and in any case knife crime and drugs are out of control everywhere. That wasn't the case 30 years ago when drugs weren't seen as normal.

There is an insistence on applying old models to unprecedented situations and refusal to look at the red flags. Why.

Children are way too young to learn the trade at 12. Innmany countries they go to learn the trade at 14/15.

I assure you that there will be no collapse :)) Thugs are in every school and has always been. That is why people move houses to send the child to the better school or send them private.

It's a giant collapse waiting to happen, let's put it that way. They are closing their eyes to the huge structural failings at every level in every area, are slaves to the outrage that is Ofsted, are trying to convince parents that schools are a safe and positive place to be, and that all kids should be in mainstream school till 16 with all kinds of appalling behaviours tolerated.

To the point that the kids who want to learn either can't find a place at all, or have to go to a school where thugs and riffraff are running the show. The same thugs not only leave school with zero GCSEs, they get rewarded and taken on trips for showing up every day and behaving like thugs, ruining it all for the decent kids who should be getting 9 GCSEs but will only get a handful through HE because of the MH issues created by having to deal with thuggery swearing and ignored abuse on a daily basis.

This is what's happening to my daughter. All the teachers' hard work (and they really do try, at this place) is in vain because they are absolutely obsessed with keeping all of them in school wearing stupid uniforms, when half of the kids would do far better leaving school and learning a trade when they turn 12.

It is shit, pointless and depressing.

We used to live in Germany, school attendance was very high in part because they do the opposite of the UK and encourage students to stay home if they have any signs of illness. This keeps bugs from ripping through whole classes.

Same in Austria, they have absolutely no issues with children staying home for illness. If it's 1-2 weeks then you might need a doctor's note but there's no pressure at all from the school's side when the child comes back. But there is also the idea that school is simply "non-negotiable". There have been no news articles or any issues post-Covid regarding attendance. School starting times are also insanely early, 7:30-8:00am, but doesn't seem to affect attendance.

Homeschooling is not allowed at all in Austria. There are no support networks, curriculum or communities for home schooling, so many parents who would have contemplated that don't bother in the end. It makes a huge difference when the option of doing so is taken away.

Another factor which may be good or bad is that SEN recognition is low. Hyperactive kids are classed as "spirited", autistic kids might be "shy" and there's the culture of treating all children as if they were NT, starting from nursery age. The overall tolerance for a wide spectrum of behaviour is much higher, whereas the incentive to get problematic kids diagnosed is much lower, if that makes sense.

The result being that most parents believe their kids are "normal" (neurotypical so to speak) and therefore have no real excuses not to go to school. Kids get forced into a routine and most adapt to it fairly well. The only kids who do get diagnosed are extreme outliers, and there are special classes or schools that offer additional support.

in France secondary school children go to school every day except Wednesday afternoon as it was traditionally reserved for religious studies

I don't see any system collapsing. The system is maybe inadequate but certainly, I would not dramatise that something is collapsing. Many countries have even worse educational systems... and it is not collapsing

I think going to school 5 days a week is too much. In France, it's 4 days a week. School is not for education in the Uk. it's designed as a place to keep your kids while parents contribute to our shit economy. This country doesn't care about education, unless its private

I would like to see more international comparisons. Do other countries include all children their stats or do they have a greater proportion in special schools and measured differently? Do they have more support for mental health issues or are they just less prevalent because the society is structured differently?

I actually think that our education system is far kinder than many others so I do wonder what’s going wrong.

In a nutshell, spot on.

Some of them are safer at home. I don't know what kind of state DD will be in when she gets to leave in 3.5 years time. Shoved into the only available sink school in a crime ridden estate, pushed around and sworn at daily in the corridors by the angry dysfunctional kids, has now started school refusing, due to anxiety after a prime y8 specimen pulled a machete out of his bag at a crowded bus stop right outside the gates. Oh and two from y11 taking drugs in the toilets and rushed to hospital. Kids who saw the ambulance were told somebody had fallen downstairs. All the school can do is phone up and bang on about 100% attendance, because Ofsted. No hope of private, spent a fortune on tutoring trying and failing to get her into selective grammar, only other decent school so oversubscribed it's barely decent any more. Anyway if I move her she'll lose the only friends she has. The education system is completely and utterly fucked. This feels like a dystopian nightmare.

Referral and diagnosis via nhs is crazy.
Already a year now on the asd side and only a you are now on a 'waiting list' but its prioritised by need
The adhd i have heard back and completed forms but nothing since oct

Dc is definitely suicidal/depressed.

But agree re the bullying.
The kids general behaviour has completely changed in y6. The boys and in y7 the girls.
Weve had
Shoes kicked off and tripped up by maybe y5 boys 6ft
Water squirted at dd -- in class (boys)
Told to FO by random other kids (boys)
Girl trying to get dd in trouble on class
Girl hiding in art cupboard
Kids moved to other classes

Y6 residential
Eating all their own snacks then hunting for other kids and eating them (3 diff kids)

In activities
Boy says to another and group you are the most hated boy in school
Throwing mallet in the air several times
Running about between teams

The problem is like a riot bad behaviour spreads.

The lack of supervision is ruining it for the meek kods and the boisterous kids as they all end up woth no friends.

What child is going to choose to go in and be told to FO. Squirted. Told they are weird.