Are we losing the plot re: attendance?

[BlueySchmooey]

Are we losing the plot re: attendance?

https://x.com/catinthehat/status/1840399910769672198?s=46&t=G9BWOZlYGPa11_pR7aKkbHQ

80% attendance is equivalent to missing one day a week. I can’t imagine many jobs that would accept this level of absence

This is such a ridiculous comparison.
If everyone was crammed into offices from 9-5 and expected to do the same job with the same people day in day out, to go in despite illness, bullying, to not make work time appointments or have accidents, you’d see a huge drop in work attendance.

As it is adults have choice.
You could work in an office, or a hospital, or you could be a joiner, a farmer, an artist, musician, or anything you want to do. You can have some control over the hours and days that you work.
If you’re ill you can be signed off sick which comes with some protections.
If you have a depression related illness you can also be signed off sick.
If you’re too ill to work there are other options, they may be hard to get, but you’re not stuck with a shitty system that shoves all children with their whole spectrum of human experience into a 9-4 existence which is supposed to be more important than the rest of their lives.

The vast majority of parents want the best for their children and do whatever they can with the resources they have to do that. We can’t go about treating all parents as abusers in order to catch the very few that are, but as the parent of autistic children with a school experience spanning 20 years, this is now where we are.
In some respects in schools safeguarding has been dropped entirely, bullying often goes unnoticed and unpunished, many school guidelines mean that pupils are taught things that are deeply damaging to the most vulnerable pupils. In the tiny area of attendance though, in the name of safeguarding, things have gone authoritarian, and it’s causing more harm than good.

Exactly

Yes. It's actually not fair on immunocompromised students or those with chronic conditions as they now miss more school and their health is harmed further.

I wonder if an EQIA was done that considered these perspectives before DfE initiated this new hardline approach on attendance.

I wonder if schools remember to do an EQIA before starting new rewards for attendance etc.

Would be interesting to do an FOI and ask the schools/DfE

I don't think it is that ridiculous?

The way I look at an illness, for example, is "is this worth £80?", as that's what I lose if I'm off sick. Often the answer is no, so I go in.

Again I believe things like medical appointments should be excluded so long as evidence can be shown. A foreign holiday isn't a right so I believe that those taking their children out of school during term time for them should be punished. I get 20 days of annual leave. School children have what is effectively 13 weeks of annual leave.

Bullying etc. needs to be dealt with but again that type of thing can occur in work environments and you need to be able to cope with it.

That's why decent employers have sick pay.
You go in with a cold so you don't lose £80. Understandable. But the employer loses way more than £80 in productivity as it spreads around the team

Similarly in a school, children struggling in when horribly unwell don't focus or learn much. And they make others ill.

If the emphasis was on policies to improve education then encouraging children to go in when they felt too unwell to focus wouldn't be on there. Nor would spreading contagion. Instead there would be an investment in technology to enable remote learning /catch up

@SweetSakura I just don't think a common cold is something to stay home for, whether I lose pay or not. It's part of life, we get poorly sometimes and the world moves on

To those saying it's not the school, it's the government directing this - schools don't have to advertise it like this.
One school I visit has A4 posters in the entrance hall with the attendance percentage for each class and comments about don't let your class down. The pressure on kids like our deaf ones is awful - letting their class down because they have hospital appointments.

Schools really don't have to manage it like that.

It is ridiculous. You’re looking at this with adult eyes, and whilst you’re in a position to weigh up the pros and cons of missing a day’s work most children, particularly those traumatised by school itself, haven’t reached that stage of brain development yet.

Are you suggesting that if you developed a severe response to going into your workplace (sobbing, vomiting, flight/fight/freeze adrenaline response) that anyone would force you in?
As an adult you could change job - different company, different sector, different environment, you could take legal action with the company that caused your distress, you could take time off sick to recover without being hassled, you could even go on benefits if lengthier recovery time was needed.

As an adult you have options and respect for your autonomy that suffering children do not have.

Depends how the cold affects you. If it is affecting concentration and focus then actually it is meaningless to go to work because you aren't going to achieve much anyway. If it doesn't affect you then fine. But we aren't talking about people who feel well we are talking about people who feel unwell

Exactly. In some schools (my dc academy - known for being one of the worst in the country for managing out children with SN) there is a glee with upholding these directives. They don’t give a shit about the children in their care. It’s all about targets.

Exactly, we're told 2 different things. For sickness and diarrohea they insist on not going back until 48 hrs after the last instance, which can end up being a week off. Even though child feels better and is bouncing off the walls. But that's THEIR rule. Then they penalise for taking that time.

I am a governor at our school and I do agree attendance is important. However, I don’t see why we can’t stretch the definition of what “attendance” looks like to suit all the different capabilities of children in different circumstance.

if schools had the funding and resourcing to offer digital learning that was home based but school led , To support both those children with MH needs and other ongoing medical requirements, and if this learning counted as attendance, as long as there was also a plan with school for either getting those children into school in future, or where suitable as frequently as is possible with their health requirements, it would remove the stress for so many. Removing that stress would likely improve attendance in person as on days where things feel good or a child is well, there’s no pressure, as there is flexible learning.

removing that hurdle would then Allow schools to look at those families where attendance isn’t for good reason. Where a child isn’t in school and there is no working relationship with parents. Making potential safeguarding issues easier to spot.

It would require government backing and funding but would be doable. We accept flexible working, WFH, and I just don’t see why children who need that for a reason can’t. Be offered that flexibility so they can still learn.

This is all Bridget Phillipson's doing. She's obsessed with attendance at all costs.
Turning our kids into little worker bees is more important than the individual needs of children and more important than child sickness or disability.

Agreed.
I actually pay for tutors for my children because they miss school due to chronic illness and the tutors are great and will do extra sessions online if they are too ill to physically go to school but their brains feel well enough to learn (both are teachers, one recently retired, one having a career break after a health condition worsened).

On a big secondary school campus you can be too ill to manage a day at school yet well enough to learn from home.

@frozendaisy , it's not just one poster and one school though.

I am a teacher, so see the attendance issue from both sides.

This stuff ‐like this poster‐ is pervasive and very much at the front and centre of attendance initiatives up and down the country.

Recognising that the reasons for low attendance differ between families and that the support put in place or sanctions applied should therefore reflect said differences would be a great starting point.

And yes, of course 'suck it up, buttercup' has been in most parents repertoire as they've sought to get their DC to school. And much stronger, bordering on harmful, strategies and approaches as encouraged by schools and local authorities when things have become difficult.

Children are different: I can raise an eyebrow at neurotypical DC2 (a +97% attendance pupil), and she automatically knows what is expected and gets on with it. Easy peasy. Autistic DC1, on the other hand, cannot be budged, swayed, cajoled or even coerced into doing something she's scared of. She has been threatened, blamed, shouted at, man-handled, locked up and deprived of privileges in order to get her inside the school building (by well-meaning school staff who have been coached in a no-nonsense approach and not to take 'no' for an answer in order to keep children safe in education). As a parent of a child who struggles to attend school, you are very much instructed to get behind the above measures, lest you yourself are deemed part of the problem. It has taken a considerable amount of evidence and intervention from health care professionals to convince school that this approach is not in DC1's best interest.

Please don't underestimate the immense effort most parents of children with EBSA undergo to get their children into school.

Those poor kids, like my youngest, who suffered from chronic anxiety and panic attacks. As it was he went to a small private school, who were understanding, he had time off when he needed it, had counselling, did well in A levels then, with good support at Uni, got a good degree and is now in a job he loves, earning good money and living his life mostly free from anxiety.

At any point up to this he could have been seriously derailed - something like this would have ramped up the pressure on him and made things much worse because he was such a stickler for not "breaking rules".

I was a teacher. I worked in a unit for kids who were sick / out of school (back in the 80's) and a few hours of intensive one to one a week were considered the equivalent of a FT in-school education.

The basic error being made here is mistaking correlation for causation. It's not the time off school as such that causes poor outcomes, time off school can easily be compensated for where needed, it's that children from families who do not support their education are more likely to have time off, and that time off will not be compensated for by the family, that's why they have poor outcomes.

Such a fundamental error in logic.

DD has EBSA. I had to give up work and it’s become a full time job to sort things out and get her into school. She is nearly in full time now but it has taken enormous effort.
She has been unwell lately, related to an underlying condition, she also panics when she is unwell and about being unwell in school. She missed a week, I’ve now had a letter about her attendance. Previously I had an agreement with the school over this kind of thing and now they are coming down hard on it, they have no choice I understand. The letter though isn’t helping get her in as it’s making her panic.

If DH woke up tomorrow and had an upset stomach, he could work from home. That’s the difference these days. I have plenty of friends who do that, change their office days around if they don’t feel good. I think it’s a pity there isn’t something for some students like that. DD would work at home no problem.

Last year, we got referred for early help for dd’s attendance because she missed 1/2 a day every week for an entire half term, plus 2 full days for a vomiting bug.

The 1/2 day per week was for school swimming for PE. All of KS2 got on a coach and went to the leisure centre for swimming every Friday afternoon, and they were marking everyone as absent because they were literally not at the school for afternoon register…because they were on a school trip! 🙈

She had hardly any other absences all year because we are send them in unless they’re on their deathbed sorts. God help the children who actually are struggling.

The nonsense about higher attendance=higher GCSEs also makes me laugh. DS, who had very little support for his diagnoses throughout secondary school, left school with 100% attendance... and a series of 3s and 4s for his exam results. F 'em all.

As a medical emergency first aider, and youth mental health first aider, nothing. There is NOTHING we can do. Take their temp, advise them to take paracetemol (which we can't give them) drink plenty, rest, and see their gp if it's not better in a few days. That is IT.

The only other thing is advise them to go home.

Although, as a YMHFA, i'd be more concerned about the stress of being in while sick, and worry about getting into trouble for BEING ill, than the actual virus they have.

Ha if only it was this simple! It’s extremely complex.

I've done everything to get my girls back in to school. One daughter ran away (she’s 9) the other daughter is taller than me and I tried to drag her out to the car to get her to go.

Now she’s on the ASC pathway and my other daughter is terrified of enclosed spaces for fear of being “trapped”

It isn’t as easy as saying get over it it’s life.

I'm even more disgusted that the posted was issued by the Schools Pastoral/Wellbeing team, the team that is there to look after the children health and mental wellbeing... and they're putting out that awful poster that is GUARENTEED to cause their SEN/Extra Needs/Ill students MORE stress.

Awful, unforgiveable behaviour.

yes they do, but they're not meant to use them in the calculations for their attendance percentage.

I had i with my son who because of suspensions/exclusions was down to 86% and was sent a shitty letter from the EWO telling me any further absence would need evidence. I calculated what it should be without the exclusions and told him if he wanted my son to spend less time off school he should refer himself to the Head Teacher who kept illegally excluding him (due to disability).

I got an apology letter back.

How? She has only been in office for less than 3 months. All this attendance malarkey has been going on for years. The posters I wrote about were last half term, when Labour weren't even in power. I know some people hate Labour but this is a long reach 😆

Yes, my daughter's school started sending out stupidly aggressive messages about attendance long before labour were elected