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

I was hugely against the closing of schools during the pandemic...of course I was called a conspiracy theorist granny killer. The damage it's done to the young in this country is shocking

As @noblegiraffe says though, there was massive disparity. I worked every day in lockdown delivering lessons, providing recorded lessons, marking work, phoning my tutor group to check in, doing a day a fortnight in person with vulnerable/key worker children. Genuinely harder than being in (though mainly because I was on a steep learning curve with remote teaching).

It's becoming more widely acknowledged that adults do not want to work in schools because they are incredibly stressful environments with poor behaviour and a constant focus on academics to the detriment of mental health.

But this is good for children?

Yeah, I can't remember much of the first few weeks of lockdown as I'd already caught Covid from somebody sent in sick. Other than having to work just as long hours from home so that they received free computers, free internet, food vouchers, welfare calls, timetables for keyworker and vulnerable children to attend, admissions still going on, etc, etc, etc - whilst being unable to walk to the toilet and back without exhaustion and gasping for breath. Can't say it was fun or particularly relaxing, despite the parents of the consistently low but not medically necessary attendance now always defaulting to the 'You were all out gardening and paddleboarding for a term nearly four years ago' attack.

Yet you are taking the few teachers that did this and project it on a whole group. I and many other spent a huge amount of time and effect rewriting SOW to fit remote learning,
We also worked hard to to innovate to still deliver our public services.
But you want to stereotype a whole group of people to suit your narrative hilst ignoring the immense amount of shit that was posted about a profession on here at the time.

💯 %

I can understand the need for state schools, but everyone still learned and managed to gain an education before the development of state schools, even some of the greats were self taught or learned from others eg Ben Franklin, da Vinci, abe Lincoln etc

I think the school system as it stands probably only meets the needs of about half the children there.

Many have specialist needs which mainstream schools are not able/funded to provide

Many children just arent academic, not necessarily through significant SEN but need to get out into the world of work in their teen years and that should be as valued as the much desired university pathways.

Most schools are far far too large, both physically and by way of numbers of children

No they didn't!

And not everyone is a da Vinci. Most kids aren't.

A friends school if you miss even one day stops you having Christmas dinner! How messed up is that for the kids? Even if you were having day surgery and your kids was back in the day after surgery they would still stop them having Christmas dinner in school as a punishment! That’s so messed up.

I feel like presenteeism is pointless when we are in an age where we could have work sent home for children.
The big barrier to that is the burden on individual teachers.

I agree with this, there also needs to be more focus also in continual learning where children are motivated to learn through reading or watching educational videos even at home.

The teachers were always amazed at how much I seemed to know about religion , politics, history etc considering I was a massive daydreamer (and could be very chatty in class!)but I learnt SOOO much through watching political programmes from a young age, reading online enclyopaedias (remember the days of Encarta etc and dial -up internet 😂) reading newspapers etcz
I was also taught to read before I started school and regularly visited the library all through my childhood and teen years .

I despair reading of the stats on how so many Households with kids don’t have ANY books in the house. It’s not a money thing it’s a culture thing. My mum was a single parent and an immigrant on a low income and whether we borrowed books from the library, bought second hand or on sale at the the supermarket or what was called “Bargain Books” we managed to have so many books around. It’s because she came from a culture and a home that valued education.

There’s an over reliance on schools as a physical place for children to learn everything which ultimately doesn’t do the kids, parents or teachers any favours in the long run. We need to start thinking differently and more creatively about education, what it is, and where it happens.

Also good points about children will struggle to value education when there are increasing gaps and inequalities in society and they see people around them progressing based on inheritance and connections, rather than based on educational achievement or hard work.

I'm explaining my experience of my children's school (and teachers I know outside of school) to explain why the contract is broken for me.

Surely those teachers who did work hard can see how infuriating it is that others didn't? And the harm that caused?

If people want to learn and be the next science or academic superstars that's one thing, but why should others suffer if people don't want to learn to begin with, ?

I agree with this, there also needs to be more focus also in continual learning where children are motivated to learn through reading or watching educational videos even at home.

Lockdown showed that's not going to happen.

I find school ridiculous these days.
Children learn by example and yet the teachers and schools don’t follow the rules they enforce.
Children effectively in trouble for daring to be unwell. Yet my children’s school often has supply teachers covering sickness in the staff. Teachers signed off with stress, but as you say if a child’s clinically anxious about school then they are forced to push through it.
Zero days off for anything else allowed for the children. Yet, a teacher recently had time off to go to a wedding in my children’s school.
In my children’s school they aren’t allowed to wear hair out loose, they have to wear flat shoes and aren’t allowed to wear nail varnish - but quite a few of the teachers have long false painted nails that could take an eye out, long flowing hair and sky scraper heels.
Attendance matters so much to the staff that they will close the school to strike for more pay , not caring one bit that children are missing a days school then. Training days taken in term time that should be taken out of their huge holiday entitlement IMO.
It’s hard to respect schools/teachers point of view when they are all hypocrites whose attitude is ‘do as I say, not what I do’.
I think the whole school system needs an over-haul.

Because a large cohort of uneducated people who are unable to productively join the workforce is bad for the whole country.

DDs attendance is currently at 60%, getting her in and sorting out what she is doing there is my job just now. She doesn’t go to all the lessons and finding somewhere suitable for her to be when she isn’t is a nightmare. The student support classroom should be good for her but they keep dumping misbehaving students in there with nowhere to go.

It’s an issue that needs money throwing at it, SEN support and more better paid staff. Support staff in schools are paid minimum wage, no wonder no one wants to do it.

There were teachers who worked hard but along with others who didnt, there was also the barrier that online learning meant nothing to some children and some families just didnt have the capacity to manage this, to manage all the kids in the house engaging with some distant concept on screen, not really being able to follow, wifi cutting out, other kids in the house making a noise/needing their own support, parents at work

It was a disaster

Exactly, that is not how things are and there needs to be a massive culture change to get there.

Actions such as shutting down surestart centres wasn’t helpful either as things like that helped instilled home learning values into parents.

I think we also need to look at the policies around correcting antisocial behaviour in school before blaming parents. My sons attendance is poor because he was attacked in school by a group of boys, known to be aggressive to other students and disruptive in classes. Those boys were subsequently removed from class for a whole two days before returning to normal, while my son is continually traumatised and terrified of being around them. When I asked that he not be in classes with them I was told they couldn't move students around as they were assigned by set. When I asked if DS could be accompanied by a teacher to travel between classes we were told he should ask his own friends to stick with him.

This group of boys have been involved in several incidents where they have ganged up on a lone pupil and are routinely disruptive in lessons including threats toward teachers. I asked what consequences there would be following the incident with my son and was told that I wasn’t entitled to know for the privacy of those students. When I suggested maybe the group of boys ought to be excluded or at least suspended for a sustained period of time I was told this should really be a last resort and every child should have a chance at education. Over a year on and DS still has to encounter these boys every day, hear ongoing threats from them (which they deny when he reports to teachers) and yet the school seem surprised when he is afraid or too anxious to go in. If I were attacked at work by a group of colleagues I would expect to never have to work with them again, and yet my son is expected to keep going in as though nothing happened.
I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to be a teacher there either, as they are having to put up with threats and disruption from pupils that they appear completely powerless to correct.

Until we do something about poor behaviour in school we are going to continue to see low attendance and an ongoing reduction in teacher numbers.

It was a bit pointless working really hard though, and soul sucking talking to 10 black screens when there should be 30, and getting little indication of what was happening. Collaborative online tasks are hard going compared to lessons so you couldn't do the intensity. Worked OK if you were clever, independent and can learn from a textbook (like the greats) but not if you need teacher eye contact and a bit more engagement.

Forgot to say as I’m not working and about during the day I’ve noticed in the last year how many children are shopping with their parents in the middle of the day now. I’m shocked how many I see now.

The idea I'm trying to put forth was similar to ancient Greeks and the open school type method where people learn from others in the community,

With google at peoples fingertips, books for others, and other humans, basically the state school method is not needed as much today for the sole purpose of learning information

As for the role of state school and social engineering, john gatto Taylor has written some intriguing articles on the schooling system.

@soupfiend too large, grossly impersonal places where many dc get lost literally

We need less huge massive comps and more smaller schools offering different things.

There is a fierce determination in this country to pretend that covid was never a big deal, that there are no long-lasting impacts and we can leave it all in the past.

It had a major impact on all of us. My physical health is damaged from catching covid repeatedly - some absence may well be due to long term effects of covid. A lot of people are a lot sicker a lot more often.

Schools have been plunged into crisis by years of terrible Tory government even without the pandemic. Stepping back into that environment - fraught with violence and disruption, full of stress and pressure, under-resourced, losing experienced and capable staff, cover lessons, lack of support - I'm not surprised a significant number of children have found that too hard. It's not feeble snowflakes feeling a little anxious - schools have been driven into the ground and they are not safe, productive learning environments a lot of the time.

Add a cost of living crisis which has an effect from the poorest families unable to buy uniform or pay for transport, up to the squeezed middle deciding a term time holiday is the only option. Again, the government's horrendous handling of the economy has made that so much worse.

I don’t think parents or schools should be shouldering all the blame here - it's no more the fault of (imaginary) feckless teachers insisting on school closures so they could sunbathe all throughout lockdowns any more than it's solely due to useless parents not bothering.

We have had one of the worst, most incompetent and corrupt governments imaginable intent on their deliberate agenda of dismantling public services, along with a pandemic. Schools were already in trouble, covid made it worse and the wreckage of state education, like the NHS, is intentional.

I only wish Labour had a more convincing vision for how to rebuild education. The best we can hope for is that at least they aren't actively trying to break it.