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.

Resilience is developed by pushing through challenges that you can cope with.

Self-harm scars, suicide, and PTSD are developed by trying to push through things that you cannot cope with and should not be expected to cope with.

By your reasoning, my parents should have ignored my demand for single-sex secondary education and forced me to attend the mixed school that my sexual assailants had gone to, to build resilience.

They nearly buried me aged 15 as it was when autistic burnout caught up with me for the first time and I overdosed on painkillers. (Don't do this, drinking activated charcoal and staying in hospital overnight isn't very nice.) I tried to push through uni, dropped out, and ended up with an abusive bf.

But it builds resilience, right? No, it doesn't, because you end up adopting and learning "coping strategies" that might work in a very specific situation but are actually harmful in later life. Examples of these include dissociative episodes, masking, self-harm, eating disorders, compulsive lying to cover up failures as things fall apart, substance abuse, and a lack of boundaries that makes you vulnerable to rape and abuse.

I'm in my forties and I still haven't fully recovered from my eating disorder.

Some of the posts on the issue are simply observing what covid and lockdown have done. It really doesn't matter in the slightest whether anyone thinks turning school into a nice to have for a while should've interfered with the social contract. It evidently did.

As I said, it doesn't matter how persuasive you find this argument. It has to work on younger people, the ones who are increasingly denied stability. It clearly isn't.

It’s not persuasive it’s simple economics. Massive debt plus unemployment equals no money for the changes you want. It’ll go one of two ways - this ‘you don’t have to work if you don’t want to’ ends, people are forced back to work, tax revenue increases and we slowly make those improvements (with a better government). Or people stay out of work in increasing numbers because ‘there’s no incentive to go’, revenue falls even further, services are further cut.

Well you're right that it's not persuasive!

But we currently have a society with a shortage of workers plus an ageing population, and no guarantee that this will change. You've not explained how people are going to be forced to work more in that situation, all you've done is say why you wish they'd go.

WW2 didn't require everyone to stay in their homes and didn't require in particular small children at the key "learning to play well with others" stage of development to be isolated from other people.

WW2 had small children shipped by train to live with strangers. The ones who were lucky enough not to be abused by said strangers were good at socialising when the war was over, because they'd had that experience of meeting a lot of new people at that key time.

In WW2, women were working en masse for the first time. When the war was over, women resisted being forced back into the home. Women had got used to financial independence and didn't want to give it up, just as desk workers got used to WFH during covid and don't want to give it up. So no, the post-WW2 workforce didn't meekly go back to how they were before WW2, just as current WFH adults and study from home kids don't meekly go back to how things were before covid.

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/21/disabled-people-work-from-home-laura-trott-benefits

New policy coming out, although whether it will work I have no idea. The tories are generally hopeless.

The improvements we have no money for.

The thing with fiat currency is that the govt can tell the governor of the bank of england to print more, at the cost of inflation. It was recently dubbed Quantative Easing.

After WW2, despite being crippled with "sovereign debt", aka war debt to the USA, we built new homes and founded the NHS so that the Battle of Britain pilots who'd had their faces burned and lost limbs would have housing and healthcare, and so would the rest of us.

"We have no money" is a political excuse, not an actual reason.

Quite apart from anything else they're not going to be in long enough to actually implement any big changes now.

How that's going to work with employers trying to get us back into the office, I don't know.

Smacks of using disabled people as a punch bag, again.

After WW2, despite being crippled with "sovereign debt", aka war debt to the USA, we built new homes and founded the NHS so that the Battle of Britain pilots who'd had their faces burned and lost limbs would have housing and healthcare, and so would the rest of us.

All possible because very few people ‘opted out’ of work/taxpaying

It's a good point, the government after the end of WW2 had brains enough to understand that people needed to be given sufficient incentive to buy in. Tangible benefits.

If there was a happy balance between traditional teaching methods & the Montessori approach to education there would be less anxiety among potentially high achieving pupils where the traditional approach is unsuitable & detrimental to learning.

Given that the unemployment rate is running at over 4%, I'd say that people aren't "opting out" but that the jobs aren't there for them to fill.

I'm sorry to read this & I agree with everything you've said. I hope you find the strength & resilience within yourself to overcome your eating disorder💐

School shouldn't be a tough time.
It's not gruel for breakfast, lunch and dinner whilst sweeping the chimneys.

One of the things my daughter struggled with most was the pack mentality of school, which often resulted in bullying. There are very few stages in your life when you spend all day forced to mix with the same age group. I think in some ways this is why home Ed groups work, there are a mixture of ages together, more like society in general and less encouragement of isolating kids who don't confirm to the their strict ideals.

DD has found worklife totally different.

@Naptrappedmummy you won't listen to alternative viewpoints and lived experience of the fact that resilience is not built by putting people into a harmful environment.

You have no experience of being either an educator, a person with Autism/ anxiety, the parent of a child with such disorders, a health professional or an autism expert yet you persist in telling people on this thread with much more experience of these things than you have that you are right.

You believe that a bit of 'common sense' should be applied, right?

You couldn't be more wrong.

Because it’s a discussion forum? And that’s what people do, discuss? There are plenty of posters on here who have opinions about, for example, transgender without being an expert in that area or having a trans child/relative themself.

A discussion involves listening to other peoples views.

Where have you done that?

You've just told people with more experience and knowledge on the subject of school refusal we're wrong.

I think there’s a certain perspective that comes when you view the issue from the outside and note the impact on society. I would be interested to know if you hold a similar view on something that affects other people’s children, like transgender, despite not being a professional or parent of such a child yourself?

There is a certain perspective yes - doesn't mean it is the correct one.

There isn’t really such a thing as a ‘correct’ perspective, isn’t that the point of discussion.

The impact on the individual is part of the impact on society. Society is made of individual people.

There's an A&E resourcing crisis. Does having a fifteen year old turn up at midnight needing an activated charcoal suspension and an emergency psychiatric evaluation make that crisis worse or better?

There's an obesity crisis. Does a woman in her forties with binge eating disorder caused by childhood bullying and sexual assault make that crisis worse or better? The bathroom scales say "worse".

Re you bringing up transgender people: Stakeholders should be consulted about resolving competing interests. Women and girls are the primary stakeholders in any debate about single-sex services, as we are the primary beneficiaries of those services, which exist to make it easier, and in some cases, make it possible, for us to exist within society. Therefore, as a woman whose female-only rape counseling, women-only swimming sessions, right to request a woman to do my smear test, etc is at risk by male-born trans people demanding to be treated as women at all times, I should have a say on how we as a society manage that conflict of interests.

The primary stakeholders in how schools are run are the children, who are represented by their parents. Adults who survived being at school whilst disabled have our experiences to offer and can also represent the children because of that insight. The able adult offering "an outside view" comes across about as well as a man turning up on FWR to say "what about the men?" and tell the feminists off for "going too far".

Are you aware that trans issues impact autistic children more than children who are not neurodiverse?

I have views on trans gender ideology and it's impact on children, particularly in schools, because I have a teenage daughter who was gender non -conforming pre- puberty but now seems to have grown out of it.

CAMHS wanted to explore gender with her because they thought they might be able to get her off their books and onto the Gender identity clinics.

So I'm not sure why you think that many parents wouldn't have informed views on gender ideology. Nor am I sure why you are trying to use this as a strawman argument.