If you work in education, what do you think is causing the current attendance issues?

[NeedAnUpgrade]

I’ve read quite a lot on this recently. DD1 is 10, she’s always been reluctant to go to school. She had a spate of UTIs, stomach aches, headaches etc. She’s had a bit of time off sick but we only triggered the attendance letter recently as it went below a certain threshold. DH and I have always done our best to get her into school, being reassured that she’s ‘been fine all day’ by her teachers. It all came to a head this year (yr 5) after a complete meltdown, several anxiety attacks and refusal to leave the house. She’s now on a reduced timetable at school and on the waiting list for an ASD assessment.
Academically she’s ahead but just can’t seem to cope with the school environment.

I’m just wondering what those who work in education think the issues are. Am I just a terrible parent? Although I’m not sure what else I could do. I suspect a complete lack of funding in education has had the biggest impact on schools and students. Especially those with SEN.

I think you make a valid point. When I was working in a school, I lost count of the amount of pupils who said they wanted to be YouTubers when they left school. I think that's partly responsible. Being told that school/education is extremely important and that they must attend and then having months where they couldn't attend followed by months when sometimes they could and sometimes they couldn't is also responsible. I wonder how it would have played out if schools stayed fully open during 2020. I'm very glad I no longer work in education.

I’m a teacher in a send school. I have children in mainstream and have also taught primary mainstream.

Environment is a massive issue for many young people. Heavily timetables lessons. Y6 sats these days are covering things I did at GCSE. Expectations are increasing on our young people. Wider access to information means that we aren’t just relying on some text books and what’s in the school library but much more access to a lot more information. All that extra information comes with a responsibility to be able to weed out what is good and bad/right and wrong. And an expectation of moving the goalposts for grading. There’s a lot of pressure on teachers from ofsted which then flows through to the kids who probably pick up on the stress. Kids don’t know how to play anymore so playgrounds aren’t full of all the games we had which kept everyone muddling along together. Nowadays it’s either boys (and some girls) kicking footballs about or groups of people bored. Kids watch football on tv and the way the players are these days, earning millions, some of their behaviours and attitudes, they rub off on the kids. Then there’s the celebrities all over tv and social media. We know the ins and outs of their lives. The good and the bad. Influences are another thing.

Parents having the stress of money. Back in the day people could often afford for one parent to stay home and nurture the kids while at the other worked. Or they had a part time job. Or when women started working it was possibly more family friendly than now. Pressures on families to keep up with the Jones’s.

Back in the day if a kid was naughty and parents were called the kid would be punished at home and in serious trouble. Now the parents goes on to pleed little Jonny’s case and that the school are out of order with their punishments. This in turn leads to staff being undermined and the ‘you can’t tell me what to do’ attitude or my parents will be down and make sure you lose your job. Behaviour in school gets worse at the same time the powers of teachers are taken off them. I’m not suggesting we go back to caning kids or anything like that but now so many parents disrespect teachers in front of their kids that the kids become disrespectful to the teachers in school. And then to other kids. Often the ones who end up with anxiety at school probably can’t cope with all the negative goings on in school.

Schools are becoming over crowded. Where we live they keep building houses but not schools. There’s nearly 2000 kids at my kids’ high school in the town I grew up in where there wasn’t even 1000 kids at the school back then. Buildings are the same (some new ones are getting built now) and aren’t fit for purpose and when things look like they’re falling down the kids lose respect for them and make them worse. But the overcrowding in schools makes corridors and classrooms busier and noisier and a lot of kids just can’t cope with the over stimulation. Many are finding that they can socialise without leaving the house so when they do have to go places like school it can be hard.

Then there’s the whole social media, TV, films etc. The contents of tv shows these days is a lot more violent and showing people being disrespectful in more ways than some would think up. Then bring mobile phones with cameras into play. No one has privacy. Not even the teachers can go to work a without worrying they’re going to get filmed and edited and made fun of online, as well as some of the more vulnerable kids. Bullying that used to go on in just the classroom or during the school day overflows to home now as we are all contactable via phones/tablets/laptops etc.

I could probably go on and I haven’t even mentioned the underfunded sen system. Kids being forced to attend mainstream school who might have been in specialist settings years ago. Then some of them being targeted by gangs etc.

Whilst there are a lot of positives to the modern world they all come with issues. Technology is amazing, cures are being found for diseases, people with disabilities are given ways to improve their lives through technology such as bionic limbs, implants to hear, communication devices etc. Disabled people can live more independently and aren’t shut away as much and hidden from society. We have a lot to be thankful for with the advances the world has made over the last century. But for many it’s too much to cope with.

Blame it on the families 🙄

Don’t actually look at the environment they’re in. Nothing to see there…

Oh wow. People with first class degrees can get much higher paid jobs with better benefits. There’s no incentive to go into teaching. There’s a recruitment crisis. If we got rid of all the teachers without first class degrees we wouldn’t have any schools to open.

Those with second class degrees are committed. I have a second class degree , I also have a 3rd in another subject, but then I also got a commendation in my masters degree which actually shows commitment as I did 2 of those degrees whilst working as a teacher. Teachers are some of the most committed people. How many other professionals do you know who work the amount of hours over their paid hours for zero pay???!!

How sad 😞 can you imagine any other demograph of people where it would be acceptable to physically force them into an institution all day.

The children are saying NO for a very good reason.
Most children and teens are trying to tell us something loud and clear.
The whole environment is toxic for all involved.

How sad 😞 can you imagine any other demograph of people where it would be acceptable to physically force them into an institution all day

The poster made it clear that was then and it isn't done now.

Sorry I haven't rtft.

This Facebook post detailing some schools' behaviour policies and BBC t g e language used - even renaming an isolation room "inclusion' is illustrative of the attitudes some schools have towards children.

As a teacher of children with SEMH and autism, I'm horrified by some of the posts here.

m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0ZAARdkCMziHzZ4EnmTbyaZt7zZ4C34de29EAyDuMSe7tHAfiMJCjfvdaHCePNPynl&id=100088528062608

Agree with absolutely everything you’ve just said.

Agree 👏🏽

@HalloweenIsDone Employers are having lots of issues with the attitude of younger workers. They simply do not understand the expectations of the workplace, they are often late and call in sick if they feel a bit tired or because their friend broke up with a boyfriend or because the weather is bad. It is a real problem.

I don't think missing school due to anxiety or illness causes issues in future working life.
Schools seem far stricter now then when I was there in 80s.
What benefit is sitting In a reflection room on own all day?

Oh come on! This wishful thinking that ‘workplaces are now laissez faire places with no rules and therefore schools should be too’ simply isn’t the experience of the majority of the workforce. And there is clearly now a brewing myth that ‘schools used to be so relaxed and quiet and that’s why so many kids can’t cope today’. I feel like whenever a sacred cow is challenged on here, a false narrative is slowly but surely formed and then becomes the party line to stop anyone from discussing whatever it is they’re trying to discuss.

This is also silly.

There's a rather vast gulf between 80% of jobs being as you initially describe and the laissez faire no rules thing you've just for some reason put in quotation marks.

The reality is that there are lots of jobs that aren't at all like school. This isn't a matter of opinion. And because it's a fact, that means the idea that people who can't cope in school are unlikely to be able to cope in jobs is nonsensical. It was a very strange claim to make.

14% of people work from home. Less than 1 in 5. The rest, 86%, have a workplace they have to attend. Half of jobs have a ‘smart casual’ dress code and the other half have a specific dress code or work uniform. A quarter of jobs involve shifts (no relaxed time keeping there), and 2/3 jobs have no flexible working options. 13% are self employed, 87% are employed and therefore very likely to have a ‘boss’ (aka manager).

Sorry but this ‘work is so relaxed now, no rules for me, yay’ is a fantasy.

I get so cross with attendance letters and percentages!….
The winter term was what, 12 weeks/14 weeks long??? In that period of time (when colds and virus’ are doing the rounds) a child only has to miss a week each half term, 2 weeks over the whole term and their percentage is then below what the school would deem acceptable… they might not be I’ll again for the whole of the spring and summer terms and then be back up in the 90 percentages….. it seems ridiculous to me to start stamping their feet about some absences due to illness!…
yeah sure if it’s unauthorised and the smith family all come back after 2 weeks with amazing suntans and holiday snaps… but if a child is sick then they are sick…. I shouldn’t have to send my child in if she’s sick… and it’s my decision to make as to whether she’s too ill for school or not!
ive not had a letter yet because there’s a bit more to my daughter situation as she has a disability so is protected by law to some degree… BUT she did miss out on rewards that were dished out based on attendance… which I totally disagree with! Why should kids miss out based on sickness!!

Again, stop putting things in quotation marks when you're not quoting.

You said 'The basic framework is nearly always the same. Timekeeping, dress code, working alongside others, completing work you are told to complete.' The use of the 'and' means you're saying that jobs nearly always include all these things.

That means if you're going to try and provide stats, you need to do so for jobs that tick all of these boxes together. Note that a job that requires a dress code is not the same as a school uniform, because a dress code is less restrictive and offers more scope to choose materials and fit you like. So you're going to need more specific data on this too. It'll be interesting to see how you find it.

Then after that, you also need to explain why a child whose problem is only some of these things can't get a job that ticks some of these boxes but not the problem one. Which means telling us why eg a child who can't cope in the noise of a classroom but has no issue with timekeeping or being told what to do can't get a shift job somewhere quiet.

You're going to have trouble doing this, but that's what happens when you make a fundamentally silly claim that you've pulled out of your arse.

The best post on the whole thread!!!
🙌

I work in an incredibly relaxed environment and I would say many of my friends do too. The trick is trust. I work hard and complete my work as agreed, therefore I can do my hours anytime between 7 and 7 Monday to Friday.

When I worked in an office for a LA we had a smart casual dress code, that basically meant no loungewear or jeans, anything else was fine. We worked flexi time so similarly to my current role, but we had to come in on the days set. But could set our own hours. We just needed to complete the work set each day. I went into this role from school and found it much more manageable than school.

The ‘trick’ is being middle class. Working class jobs don’t tend to have this flexibility.

Childrens & adults mental health is more important than any attendance figures

In a world where money doesn’t exist, yeah. If nobody is turning up who pays the tax which funds the 5* MH services you all want? First world thinking at its finest!

@Bubble08080 Well said. I really want to take my ASD/EBSA teens out of school for their mental health, but I'm not brave enough to do it. I worry they'll blame me when they have no qualifications 😥

I suppose the real tricks getting a back office job. I went straight into an apprenticeship from school. No degree here. But yes obviously if you chose to work in a supermarker or similar, you're going to expect rules, shifts and uniforms. Noone would go into a customer facing role expecting to come and go as they please.

The point is when you leave school there are 1000s of different roles, with different demands and requirements. And you can choose a role that suits you. And if it doesn't work, you find a different role. It is not a regimented 'you will do this and this is the only way for the rest of your life' like school is.

Really? You don’t believe people struggle to find work? Why on earth do we have unemployment then?

🙄 Ofcourse people struggle to find work for all sorts of reasons. But writing a child off because they cannot cope with the school system is bullshit.