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 agree with this. I am having trouble getting my dd into school because she doesn't feel safe there and the teachers are not able to discipline students who need it. She says there are fights daily, she has been sworn at pushed and she is expected to still attend every day and get on with it.

I am quite happy for you to talk about your experience, and your children's teachers and your children's school.
But can you see how infuriating it is to see this used as a stereotype?
Teachers did this.
Teachers did that.
Schools did this.
When clearly it is not the case.
If you were on MN during Covid you would have seen teachers on here talking about this and saying how children should be back in schools, and that being back in schools needed to be done so that all children were in school all the time, hence the measures that were being asked to be pushed forward so that we didn't end up with half classes and half year groups missing from the school (like we did).
And can you see how infuriating it was for arseholes to push this back as "you want schools closed"?

If they want children in school, they need to make school better. School funding has been stripped to the bones meaning children with additional needs are not getting the help they need, hard working children are flying under the radar as the poor teachers struggle with crowd control, and cunty academies run schools like businesses with all the emphasis on budgets and hitting targets. The government can fuck right off if they think they can pass this problem off on the parents. YOU fucked up the education system (and the NHS) and now you want parents to fix it? Classic dario and just another gaslighting tactic used by the twats in power.

@FindingMyKindOfPeople there are lots of misconceptions in your post, but this stands out as one that’s been explained many times. Training days taken in term time that should be taken out of their huge holiday entitlement IMO.
I’ll try once more. Training days were taken out of holidays. Pupils now have exactly the same number of school days as before INSET was invented. Sometimes one might be scheduled within a term so that a particular trainer is available to visit the school - this doesn’t mean it’s an extra day. There will still be 190 school days, as there always have been.

It's been along time since DD was at school, but she used to have at least 1 week off during term-time each year. Not because I couldn't be bothered to take her in, but because our school and the school where her half sister went (neighbouring counties, we're 3 miles over the boarder), had different half term dates. It still happens now with the local primary. You can always tell when the secondary school is off because the attendance in the village primary plummets due to both being under different LEA's.

Please can we send this thread to Gillian Keegan and Bridget Phillipson ?

But if they are just going to be disruptive in class, then surley the greater good for society is for them to pursue other options if they truly want to learn ?

*darvo not dario 😁

I wrote this at the time. It didn't get much traction then, because parents didn't want to hear it.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3941702-Annoyed-your-kid-isn-t-having-zoom-lessons-or-school-contact-or-not-going-back-to-school-yet

Schools reopening haven't solved those problems. They've just hidden them from parents better.

@stealthninjamum..

You are probably exhausted from fighting such tiny battles but did you let the local mp know about this or the council.

It's little things like this that can make a huge difference to the classroom. It can mean the difference between a child sat calmly listening and not disrupting others, to that child having no outlet for thier emotions and causing problems for themselves and others.

It can be that simple, let the child doodle and yet for some reason teachers they literally can't understand or comprehend this.

I'm a teaching assistant and whole heartedly agree with this!!

We speak to parents about behaviour but they do nothing (in fact they argue with us in school). We showed a parent CCTV footage of their child and they still argued. As a school we struggle if we don't have parent backing when it comes to poor behaviour.

But that is because you couldn't be bothered to take her in? One half term out of 6 holidays so you did not need to go away that half term.

And these emails are still available to back up these statements? The teachers in my family probably worked more hours during lockdown than before lockdown. I don't believe a word of this claim.

If they get rid of inset days your child will still be off the same amount of days - teachers will just get 5 extra days off and be less trained!

No, it is not for the greater good of society to have those kids out on the streets causing trouble rather than in school.

That's why schools aren't allowed to kick Y11 out on study leave at Easter anymore.

"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

I find this incredibly depressing. I had some high hopes for Labour when Phillipson talked about scrapping one word judgements for Ofsted, but since then all I’ve heard is how she wants schools to take on more responsibility for childcare and now saying she wants to add attendance to the inspection framework. More paperwork do do, more accountability, but no additional money and no critical thinking about what it is about schools currently that might make children not want to go! Funding, lack of teachers willing to stay in the job (there is NOT a lack of teachers), ridiculous expectations on schools, a narrow and overfilled curriculum , crumbling buildings, Ofsted etc

I heard something this morning on the radio about compulsory PE to sort attendance which made me cough up my coffee! I quite liked school but hated PE and if there had been more of it, it would have absolutely put me off going! More music, art and baking, maybe, but more Pe?! It’s not a solution for everyone!

Honestly, after the first lockdown and zero contact I began to think of school as unimportant. It was just me and the kids while the husband worked throughout. I still home schooled, so they weren't behind. They were fantastic. Alot of their friends experienced anxiety and refused to go back to school, one of them still wears a mask all day at school because he's scared. Also many kids with sens don't fare well in secondary schools. The whole mainstream over crowded set up doesn't work for them. There needs to be more separate schools for autism.

Yes, I think there are lots of issues around disadvantaged children or children with SEN and the persistent lack of mental health support as well as children who have suffered with loss of social skills/increased anxiety....
....

But I also think that for your bog standard middle class family, the "contract" was broken in a lot of cases because some schools were just so incredibly bad. I know that I have always been the sort of parent who is very supportive of schools and teachers, push hard for attendance etc. And now, while my children still have very high levels of attendance, I do that b because I think it's important, but because I am in the slightest bit interested in supporting the school. Becuase they let me down. At our primary school during Covid, for the first 2 major lockdowns, my children did not have so much as a single phone call from the school. There were no online lessons, there was no engagement with teachers. After the first 8 weeks, we received a weekly PowerPoint with the teacher's VOICE, not even a video. The lessons we were supposed to delver were vague and unclear and required extensive work on our part.

The whole thing was a complete shit show and it made me lose all faith in their school. Now, I do what I think is best for my kids but I have to admit, I've lost interest in engaging with the school as a whole.

We also had families who could only afford one family laptop. They weren't deemed 'poor enough' for help so their children suffered.

I worked 100 hours a week managing in school kids, home learning kids, packs of work, emails, safeguarding etc. Guess who said I was sitting in my garden....the parents who didn't do the home learning!

It was a massive cluster fuck.
But you would have thought that people would have learnt from the situation.

But here we are still divided by a government that is gas lighting parents, teachers and everybody else.

We all now that the education if fucked up, yet instead of standing together we are all shouting at each other whilst the government happily passes on the blame to everyone else but themselves.

I didn't, her dad took her away, along with her sister....or should he have just left 1 behind?

They how is it productive for people being bullied, for a teachers time spent trying to manage the disruptive behaviors rather than teach the actual lessons etc ? Unless we develop as an example social isolation blocks then how can people safely learn ?

100% agreed

@BridasShieldWall

Any little understanding would go an extremely long way in sen knowledge.
As little as a pp saying her child needs to doodle to regulate emotions and help the dc concentrate.

There are plenty of free courses out there in the basic of sen they don't take long to complete.
There are many sen consultants who could change a school around in a few hours of understanding, tips and stragety.