Parents to be asked to solve school attendance crisis

[noblegiraffe]

There is an article in the Times about the current school attendance crisis. It cannot be overstated how awful the attendance crisis is. Pupils, particularly disadvantaged pupils, are staying away from school in much larger numbers, and for more days than before covid.

It says that lockdowns broke the contract between parents and schools which said that school attendance was compulsory.

It blames parents for keeping their children home when they have a minor illness or are slightly anxious about school.

It quotes Bridget Phillipson, Shadow Education Secretary as saying "If I were secretary of state, I’d be sending a very clear message to parents that every day at school matters, and that irresponsible parents who don’t care about sending their kids to school are harming other kids’ life chances, not just their own"

(Whereas current Education Secretary Gillian) "Keegan will expand a programme that gives children skipping school an attendance mentor who could drive or walk youngsters from their home to school in the morning or negotiate with head teachers on their behalf. She said: “Persistent absence is a hangover from the pandemic affecting schools around the world. Schools and the government cannot do this alone.

“Families play a big part in attendance and parents have a legal duty to make sure their children are at school. I know it can be hard to get children out of the door, especially when they are feeling a bit anxious or have a mild cough or cold, so we must rebuild the social contract between parents and schools and make sure everyone plays their part.”

While lockdowns are brought up, what is not mentioned is the utter state schools were in between lockdowns and after lockdowns. Children were being supervised in halls rather than being taught due to lack of teachers who were ill (and this is still happening now due to inability to recruit). Lack of teachers meaning that kids get endless cover which can be largely a waste of time. Children who are anxious about attending school are expected to get on with it while teachers who are unable to cope with the poor behaviour of students are signed off with stress. The experience of children in schools during and since covid can be extraordinarily shit.

Attendance is much lower in pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Child poverty is not mentioned - I was reading about a child who couldn't attend school because her mother needed to use the one pair of shoes they shared. Other children are needed to look after younger siblings while parents work because they can't afford childcare. How will this be solved by sending a car around?

But we also know that schools in disadvantaged areas are more likely to struggle to hire staff. What is the point in a child attending school when they don't have teachers? How will Keegan and Phillipson argue that one?

This bit is the most worrying:

"A Labour government, Phillipson said, would place more emphasis on absenteeism as part of the Ofsted inspection framework, with schools compelled to produce an annual report on attendance, off-rolling (removing a pupil without using a permanent exclusion) and safeguarding. Schools are required to submit weekly attendance records to the Department for Education but absenteeism does not have its own Ofsted criteria, instead falling under a broader category of “behaviour and attitudes”.
These reports would affect the Ofsted rating given to schools, which would also take into account the progress they have made in shrinking the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers"

Linking an Ofsted grading to attendance will just doom schools in disadvantaged areas to low Ofsted grades at a time when Ofsted had just started to recognise that grading a school based on disadvantage was a bad idea.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/1d7eb40d-c4c4-4dcc-85ea-ad6f62c65b9c?shareToken=6c4b865c0c1b8626f2761a5ad733b608

Every parent I know who has a kid with school refusal issues (and I know quite a few) would love their child to be back in school, but you can't just drag them there by the hair!

THIS

It’s all such a difficult balance game

I see this from lots of sides - school staff , parent - teenager parent

last year my daughter struggled with attending. Waiting list for cahms ect

I found the most difficult thing was working with the school.

one particular bad day my husband and I had battled with her for the best part of an hour, we had had an awful morning, finally got her in to school 11 mins past the start of the day- and her head of year put her in isolation for the day for being late .

it felt like a massive slap in the face for us as parents - I mean why bother even getting her in if she’s missing all her lessons anyway?

thank fully lots has improved this year and attendance for autumn term was 100%

I do know she’s miserable in school luckily she only needs to hang on till may

I can see why teenagers struggle with some rules - arguments about sock colour ect

it also needs mentioning that it’s really hard to physically get them into school when you are at work yourself - often the first you know that they aren’t in school is a missed call at your lunchtime from the school .

The answer is linking NHS services, mental and physical, social services, special needs and dental services really closely to schools. It is the lack of integration between all the services that is the problem. If one person were in charge of each disadvantaged child and given a healthy budget and quick line to all services in an efficient manner, then Government would not get away with constantly shafting schools and teachers to try and do the job other services are completely failing at. Just look at the NHS. It is falling apart because they do not talk to each other, lack of communication is the problem even within individual hospitals they often do not talk to each other properly across disciplines. It is massively frustrating for the service user. If every teacher could just pick up the phone to social services/doctor/mental health etc and they were responsible and prompt, we would not be in this mess. It is not getting small problems fixed in a timely manner that then escalates.

It is the same problem with the elderly. Lack of integration between NHS and the rest. Getting these services to communicate really effectively with each other rather than just passing the buck is the problem.

@fluffyguineapig The next step, if you've not already, is likely to be to lodge an appeal via the SEND Tribunal which you can do yourself for free. It's still not quick (likely around 12m).

If they're not complying with the ruling of a Tribunal then next steps are legal action which unfortunately usually comes at a cost.

That's interesting, because teachers are less likely to call in sick when they are unwell as a profession than other professions. https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/exclusive-half-teachers-go-work-unwell

Lots of teachers know that it is a bigger challenge to set cover when ill and then pick up the pieces of cover lessons than it is to go in and just drag yourself through the teaching day.

Sickness absence has massively increased in teachers since the start of covid because of covid.

INSET days are for staff training and are already taken out of teachers holidays (they took a week from school holidays to create the 5 INSET days).
Strikes were necessary.
Schools never actually closed during lockdown and teachers, TAs and lunch staff were working in person throughout.
Remember schools only closed to some children - they were actually open the whole way through to vulnerable or key-worker children.
School partial closures during COVID were ordered by the government - not by teachers.
Teachers were enclosed in airless rooms with 30 odd children and were not prioritised for vaccination, resulting in high infection rates and absences which exacerbated school closures.
Teachers and school staff did work all the way through lockdown. Some posters on here implying they were all off paddle boarding are being unfair and quite frankly ridiculous to tar everyone with the same brush. By far the majority were working harder than ever and putting themselves at risk by doing so. Remember the government saying schools were safe as children did not get or spread COVID? Teachers were out driving round to vulnerable children’s houses and delivering meals or checking on the at-risk ones who did not come in.
I’m sure some teachers did less than others but I’m equally sure that happened in most jobs.

This is an excellent point. I know of several students for whom school attendance is massively affected by medical issues which we simply cannot do anything about. The support isn't there, and it's not for want of everyone trying.

There hasn't been a tribunal. A school that never even answered the consultation was named on his EHCP, and is unable to take him safely as there is a recruitment crisis with TAs, and although he was assigned the highest possible funding, that apparently isn't enough to have an actually full-time TA. So he can't go. The LA didn't consult the SEN schools as they are full. I asked them to consult a private SEN school and he was offered a place. Then the process stalled. There has not even been a timescale given for when they will look at his case, and nobody even answers the phone at the LA.

one particular bad day my husband and I had battled with her for the best part of an hour, we had had an awful morning, finally got her in to school 11 mins past the start of the day- and her head of year put her in isolation for the day for being late

A young person I worked with to get back into school arrived for his first day back in months - the teacher greeted him with “Ah Mr X, I see you’ve decided to grace us with your presence” - said young person turned on his heel and walked out of the school. Some teachers really don’t help things.

this is some advice from ‘young minds’ camhs in school refusal :

“Don’t try and force your child into school. However stressed you feel, try to be calm and show you’re on their side. Allow a day off for the sake of their mental health if they’re struggling.
Maintain proactive, regular contact with the relevant people in school. Ask what they can do to help. Schools and individuals vary hugely on how supportive they are, so find someone helpful. Make it clear you are doing everything you can to work with them.
Contact CAMHS early. Mental health professionals can advocate for your child with the school, but waits can be long, so don’t delay.
It’s often difficult for your child to articulate the problem. They may be in a heightened state of stress and not know why or feel able to explain.”

So. If this is the official advice, are we supposed to force them in on the schools advice or not?
If we contact the school and they advise camhs, and then camhs put them on their 3 year waiting lists, shall we just force them in the meantime?
What’s the point of camhs advice if it’s to be overridden by schools?

I think we are deluded if we don’t understand that the impact of Covid wIll last much longer than 3 years.

totally agree 👍

I’m a GP and I see a lot of these children with poor school attendance as parents often seek my help in addressing the issue and/or explaining to the school what is going on. The monitoring of school attendance is a blunt tool anyway, and it has always caused a lot of pressure and upset for parents with very sick children. I’ve had so many parents of kids dealing with things like leukaemia, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, severe Crohn’s disease, anorexia etc. in tears due to nasty letters from their kids school when their kids have literally been inpatients for months on end and are often actually attending the hospital school. I’ve even had one terminally ill teenager with cancer not attending chemo sessions because they and their parents felt so under pressure by the school to have good attendance. And I’ve had parents whose kids have norovirus say they’ll be sending them in to school even though they’re still infectious, because it will cause problems with their attendance record otherwise. So I’m not personally totally behind the obsession with high school attendance rates anyway. Having said that, it’s clear that school attendance has got genuinely worse since the pandemic.

There is a huge issue with poor provision of mental health support for children generally with respect to CAMHS etc. This was always the case but has got much worse since the Conservatives came to power (along with the deterioration of the NHS as a whole), and it’s been even worse since the pandemic, which unsurprisingly in itself really affected the mental health of many children.

I totally agree with a pp who said we can’t just sweep the pandemic itself and it’s effects under the carpet, a lot of kids (and parents) had a really tough time during the pandemic and there are lingering knock-on effects from that in terms of mental wellbeing and levels of educational attainment, which the government have not even tried to address properly. Many other countries have thrown a lot of money at this problem, the U.K. however has seemingly decided that kids were totally unaffected by the pandemic and can just carry on as normal.

CAMHS are ridiculously overwhelmed, underfunded and understaffed, I genuinely find it hard to understand why people aren’t more up in arms about it (I’m not seeing any protest marches about this for example), other than the fact that the parents of the affected kids are often so ground down by trying to support their kids that they don’t have the energy or motivation or time to protest about it. If I was in government and could pick just one thing to improve to make sure attendance improves, it would be to hugely improve access to CAMHS. I think this is a massive and obvious bottleneck in the problem of reduced school attendance.

As well as kids with mental health problems like depression and eating disorders, there is also a huge issue with children with SEN, many of them have struggled a lot with the pandemic and school lockdowns, and schools were not always dealing with these kids well even prepandemic (often due to lack of resources rather than lack of willingness, although I will say that some schools seem awfully quick to off-roll children and actually I think monitoring off-rolling properly as proposed here is a good idea). These kids are also dealt with by CAMHS. The waiting time for assessment via CAMHS was always long but has basically doubled since the pandemic, which is a huge deal when it used to be a 2 year wait prepandemic and is now a 4 year wait (I am not exaggerating, it’s a 4 year wait for an autism assessment in a child locally on the NHS, regardless of whether they are going to be sitting important exams like GCSEs in that period).

Bullying is a huge issue as well and some schools are not dealing at all well with it. I would agree that most schools do not go far enough in trying to meet the needs of SEN pupils, although I do appreciate that this is largely down to inadequate funding by the government. Teachers came in for a lot of criticism by the public during the pandemic (I feel like they were the most hated group after us GPs!) and the government is fully aware that there is little public sympathy for teachers so sadly they know they can get away with underfunding in education as they can for GPs.

Also many schools have still to put back in place the extracurricular programmes they had prepandemic to the same sort of level, which means one of the “pull-factors” to school is gone. Again this likely comes down to poor funding and a recruitment crisis.

I would say as well that we have been in a period of apparent “permacrisis” in this country for some time now, and people (including parents) generally are just burned out trying to cope with relentless difficulties. In such an environment, and especially after lockdowns during the pandemic, and a current cost of living crisis, I think a LOT of people are re-evaluating how they live their lives and what is really truly important to them. Therefore eg the parent of a school refuser may decide that their child’s mental wellbeing and their own mental wellbeing takes priority over forcing the child into school against their will. Parents just aren’t willing to push as hard as they once would have, because they haven’t got the resilience any more to cope with the adverse consequences of that, and because their values have perhaps shifted slightly as a result of the pandemic. I know that I myself decided during the pandemic that the mental health of my secondary school age child with ADHD was ultimately more important than his academic achievement, particularly given the lack of access to CAMHS if his mental health were to become an issue.

And yes, I think parents are more likely to keep kids off school for a holiday or weekend away, as due to the cost of living crisis they simply can’t afford it in term time, and following the pandemic where they may have worried about never seeing extended family again, they may well feel that this is more of a priority than schoolwork. Everyone has been through a miserable stressful and difficult time during the pandemic and it’s maybe not that much of a surprise that people are prioritising family time, travel and general enjoyment of life right now. I’m not saying that’s necessarily “right”, but I think given human nature, people ought to understand that it’s inevitably going to happen.

I read an article the other day saying it would take at least ten years and possibly up to thirty years until the NHS gets back to “normal” after the pandemic and catches up with the backlogs. That our patients today are not the same patients we dealt with in 2019 following their experience of the pandemic. I think the same applies to education, it’s unrealistic for people to expect everything just to go back to normal right away and the parents of 2023 are simply not the parents of 2019. Especially when the government has made very little effort compared to other countries, in terms of planning and funding, to get children back on the right track, and many parents are still very much struggling with their own issues post-pandemic and during a cost of living crisis.

But those children whose parents were key workers were in school all the way through lockdown. Schools did not close through COVID, they were always open for keyworker and vulnerable children. They were staffed by the same teachers and TAs you accuse of doing nothing but having a jolly at home.

I'd like to see 100% attendance awards scrapped, especially in secondary school. My DS had attendance issues due to then undiagnosed SEN and he quickly worked out that if you are unlucky enough to get a stomach bug or something in October it's game over for the reward and you might as well wag school as often as possible. Same with lates or uniform breaches - you get isolation which allows you to stay away from the dick heads who are tormenting you. If there had been more strategies to help vulnerable pupils cope in school and an offramp for the spiralling consequences and loss of rewards he may have been more inclined to try. The big academy chains in particular are totally lacking in empathy and understanding and their "computer says no", impersonal approach to dealing with everything is why children don't want to be there.

I think that there are lots of different causes of non attendance and they all need different solutions - there isnt one answer. But nearly all the answers are about support, whether its housing, mentsl health, medical, or food. A few are about the fitness of the system in terms of buildings, curriculumn and lack of staff.

I also agree thst my child that goes to msinstream school has a lot of cover lessons. 60 to 100 in a hall with a "cover supervisor' mixed year groups and subjects. I would struggle to believe those days counted. Not blaming the school. Blaming the government.

It's a very complex issue with many factors involved. As a school manager I'm aware staff absences have risen too - covid and mental health account for a lot of these. Bland political statements don't really help as can be seen from the responses on this thread, but basically it is the same message that was always there - school attendance is important. I also seen an OFSTED briefing which was sensitive to the fact there are a variety of issues at play.

I think the mental health impact of the pandemic was massive and that needs a lot more attention. SEN needs seems to have risen too, though that may be a local issue for us. Funding and provision for all these things is very much lacking. School budgets have been cut, so there have been staff cuts so fewer people in school to support anxious children and meet SEN needs.

And for sure, the closure of schools did give a message that children CAN do without education and also, for some, that home schooling is just fine. Parents are more blatantly flouting the rules and refusing to bring their children to school (not the vast majority, but a significant minority) and I feel some have less respect for the system than they used to have.

Political parties need to outline HOW THEY will work towards better attendance, not simply harass parents.

Inset days were never part of the provision for children- they were taken from teachers’ holidays. Children still have 190 days in school, just as they did before inset days were introduced. This has been the case since they were introduced in the 80s. (Baker days).

Government decrees bank holiday dates.

Teachers made the financial sacrifice of striking to highlight the devastating impact on schools of 14 years of underfunding. Given the degree to which government have reneged on settlement agreements, further strikes are possible.

Schools never actually closed during lockdown and teachers, TAs and lunch staff were working in person throughout.
Remember schools only closed to some children - they were actually open the whole way through to vulnerable or key-worker children.

Actually my children’s school did close during lockdown. Vulnerable children were moved to a hub bringing together 5 local primary schools with teachers from each school covering 1 day a week on a rota basis. This meant the education provision for my children was inaccessible because they both have additional support needs and couldn’t have coped with the constant changes in class teachers and support staff - as confirmed by their own HT who knows them well.

In the second period of lockdown they were “lucky” to have 2 half days per week, despite having multiple vulnerabilities and a key worker parent.

The local special school closed completely in first lockdown, offering very reduced timetable in second lockdown and then only to a small percentage of students.

I don't think school (especially senior school) is suitable for huge numbers of children - and actually hasn't been for decades. Education aside, the bullying and abuse that goes on (and that isn't effectively dealt with if at all) isn't anything that children should be subjected to (often for years on end).

The whole education system needs an overhaul.

Also, school gave a half day for the world cup or whatever it was. More than once too. They can't expect people with serious problems to fight tooth and nail for their kid to attend only to have them told it's ok, football is on you don't need to be here. I lost all respect for attendance agendas at that point, and I work in education too.

Really! Because teachers are most likely to work through being sick as its such a nightmare to have to set work when you are off, not to mention catching the classes up on what has been missed or just not taught.

Again that was some schools, not all.

I think the impact of the Covid period on children has yet to be fully understood, or perhaps even seen. My child is suffering from anxiety (along with seemingly most of their peers) and as a result I’ve been doing some reading on childhood anxiety. When you read about the ‘science’ behind childhood anxiety it’s blindlingly obvious that our children are damaged. They spent two years being told to be scared - wash your hands, wear your mask, you don’t want to get covid or pass it on if you’re carrying it - and around adults who were super stressed and anxious themselves - either at home or at school. They learnt to be anxious all the time. You can’t just switch that off, and the government can’t just expect children who are now suffering from poor mental health as a consequence to just ‘get over it’ when they’ve given them fck all help to do so.

Plus, damn straight the social contract was broken. Shutting schools for months on end and expecting children to be taught by parents who were doing their own jobs at the same time was of such little consequence that the government felt it was fine to provide fck all recovery assistance afterwards, yet taking my child out of school for a few days a year for a family holiday is massively damaging? Yeah, right.