WFH causing school refusal to increase.

[rivalsbinge]

I read a thought provoking post on LinkedIn a comment about school refusals being so much higher since WFH became more "normal"

In essence the thought was a lack of everyone up, dressed out the door, it's now kids up breakfast dressed smart, out the door with parents in PJs or leisure wear going back home to work and the kids knowing that parents are at home makes them more likely to want to also stay home.

Obviously the parents do work but the kids (age dependent) are not seeing this and are thinking work/ school is now optional.

I did think this poster may have a valid point but interested in what others think, I'm also not talking about SEN and other considerations.

It isn’t actually true that this problem didn’t exist in the 80s and the 90s; the problem was that attendance wasn’t monitored or given much attention. It was only in 1999 that the system for children being absent changed, following the abduction of two girls on their way to primary school. No one knew they were missing until they failed to return home; in fact they’d been abducted six hours before.

Yep! The idea that all kids needed to be in school every day hadn't long embedded before school closures. Basically a late 90s, 21st century thing. Which is why it's not surprising that closing schools fucked with it.

As for the topic of the thread, there's no evidence of any of this. It's simply a thing the Ofsted chief inspector has pulled out of his arse.

Rubbish. It's because schools are so awful even teachers don't want to work in them. They can be horrid, toxic places. And lockdown showed them that they don't have to be there. Make schools pleasant places to be, kids will attend.

My mum would have definitely still been in her dressing gown as I left for secondary school. She’d perhaps then enjoy a bath once the house was empty, watch a bit of morning TV, go out for lunch with a friend and play tennis in the afternoon. I still knew it wasn’t an option for me to stay at home with her instead of going to school.

I think part of the shift to school refusing is that parents are more empathetic towards their children. When I was a child there wasn’t much thought as to whether children were struggling in any way, they were just children and just had to do what adults told them to do.

Dh and I have always worked from home. We also always are dressed smartly, even on our days off. There’s no excuse. The only people I see in their pj’s are the mums who don’t work.

That said, if you are a school refuser I’m sure you’re less likely to go in if you have a parent at home because your parent is still around to look after you. The ones in our school all have at least one SAHP so presumably they have capacity to keep them home. Ours go in whether they like it or not, because though one of us is always home, not wanting to go to school isn’t a good enough reason to stay home.

I was a school refuser. I missed an entire year of school. My mum gave up and stopped trying and I was just left at home all day alone at 10. No doubt she might have felt less guilty if she could have wfh and I wasn’t just abandoned at home 12 hours a day. But probably what she really needed was a bit of flexibility from work to get me into school in the mornings. I definitely needed to be in school and not at home watching tv, but the issue was more she simply couldn’t be asked with the battle and I think that’s the case for quite a few (not all) school refusers. Keeping them home is easier for parents but not necessarily better for them, and wfh makes it even easier.

Where are the statistics/ data on this? Or is this just someone’s opinion/ feeling?

I don't think wfh is the biggest factor here. I think it may affect a couple of days per year when a child is borderline whether they are well enough for school and with wfh it may be easier to keep them off.

We both work out of home and I sent my DS to school one days a few weeks ago when I could have kept him off but it was a tricky day for us to miss (snotty cold).

I'm a secondary teacher and from my pov the bigger factors are:
-covid and being told for two ish years to stay off if you are even slightly symptomatic
-the inflexibility of our curriculum and school system giving fewer options for children who are struggling with academic work
-families where parents are struggling with their mental health/addiction/neglect/long term financial issues.

@Antsinmypantsneedtodance schools can't simultaneously mirror every workplace though. And lots haven't changed because they can't - train drivers, shop workers, doctors, oil rig workers - they can't rock up when it suits them, wearing whatever they want. And 1,500 kids choosing their own destiny sounds like chaos 😅

I would hate to wfh and would never apply for a wfh or hybrid role as I need to be out of the house and around other people. I think work from home appeals to people who want to stay in their home in a quiet environment, so it is likely that many of them have children who feel the same way.

I think it’s this. So many people (including many on this site) who now seem crippled by anxiety about any human interaction outside the home.

I will admit the absolute opposite. I am a grumpy moo in the mornings and it's been brilliant not having to get up.

Agree! It’s down to parents allowing it. If the kids know from a young age the answer is no, unless really poorly, they will stop asking. If the child has an additional need it changes matters but even then routine and high expectations are very important.

This is quite an interesting extension of the Women Are Ruining Children narrative to make sure that no matter what you do, you're ruining your children.

Work outside the home? Your kids are in nursery/wraparound care for long hours and get no downtime, it's terrible for them, you'll destroy their mental health.

Work from home? Your kids will become school refusera because you're not setting them a good example by being out the door before they've finished their breakfast.

Stay at home mum? You're a terrible role model and your kids will have low expectations of the role of women in society and won't learn proper independence.

Or something. The tropes are all bollocks and the problems are a lot more complex.

(I work a couple of days from home and the rest in the office, agree I'm more likely to bung them into school when they're off-colour if I'm five minutes away not a 90 minute commute.)

I had shite attendance as a teen. I was a high achiever (would be all A* A Levels these days). I also attended a failing school, and was a pretty introverted kid with awkward parents who made it harder for me to fit in (looking at you, hiking rucksack).

My mum was always on at us to be up and ready for the day, so much so we were forced out of bed at 6am (totally not needed).

Being the smart kid that I was, I quickly learned that "migraine" was a quick get out for the mornings where I a) knew I was well ahead in lessons, b) was exhausted from the early wakes as a night owl who'd lie awake til 2am and c) didn't exactly look forward to the social aspect either.

I do genuinely suffer migraines, so some of them were real. But some of them were faked as a coping mechanism for poor parenting and poor schooling.

This 100%

It's well reported that SEN needs in school children is rising at a steep rate. SEN correlation to school refusal is also high. If I was a betting person, then I'd be betting this is far far more likely to be attributed to the current absence rate than WFH parents!

FWIW I WFH about 3-4 days a week. I'm always dressed. I have a garden office, which the kids know is my workplace. But more importantly, WFH means I can be there for school drop off 4 mornings a week. Before it was wraparound care both ends of the day, and then the bloody papers were reporting on how awful it was that so many kids were left in childcare for hours each day without a primary caregiver to drop off and collect them, and that the day was far too long for kids to cope with. I genuinely feel like parents (and let's be honest, they're talking about mothers mainly here) will never win!

So why wasn't this an issue when the majority of mums were SAHM and the children knew they weren't going off to work but would be at home most of the day?

I think it's just looking for excuses rather than focusing on why schools are struggling in the first place - because that means admitting that the governments over the last few years have failed schools in so many ways.

What amazes me, is that the people in power will come up with no end of ideas as to why there is such a high percentage of children who struggle to go to school-but none of the ideas actually look at schools, they just try to parent blame!

A work ethic is there no matter what job you do or where you do it. Whether you are a cleaner or a CEO you can teach your children a good work ethic. If you are out 8-6 each day or work from home, you still teach them this.

People WFH do not slob around in pjs doing the odd 5 mins of work here or there.

‘School refusing’ a dreadful term to start with as these children aren’t refusing they are unable to attend school. About 99 percent of cases the children will have some form of sen, nothing or very little will have been done by schools to support them at the early stages of struggles, it’s mostly ignored/they’re told to ‘not be silly, look around-everyone has to go to school’ until they can not cope.

Schools are also pushing children from reception age, there are phonics tests, times tables tests, SATs and that’s just primary. Go back 20/30 years and children went to school to have fun whilst learning.
It’s not the schools or the teachers fault, it’s the Government that set the hoops that schools have to just through, the league tables, the Ofsted ratings, the attendance figures.

So no, WFH has not allowed children to think staying home is an option!

It’s true attendance didn’t used to be monitored like it is now.

What people are also forgetting is that in the 80s/90s, staying home was boring. If you were lucky you got to watch the educational programming that was on for a couple of hours from about 10-12 and then it was mostly the news. You couldn’t be in touch with your friends non-stop like you can now. You didn’t have the entire internet at your disposal on demand to entertain you. The pull factors that keep people at home are far greater now due to technology. School is ‘boring’ by comparison in a way it wasn’t in the past.

Saying “except for SEN” makes your post pointless because the vast majority of school refusers will have SEN, often autism.

Their needs are often not being met in school. By the time they get to secondary theres a karge minority who are way behind with no hope of catching up, but they are still put through the same GCSEs and expected to sit through lessons they cannot engage with. It is an absolute waste of their time if they come out with 1 and 2 grades they would be better off learning work skills.

Young people arent stupid so they realise this.

There's another long thread on this. For those of us who have sadly had experience of the great challenges of supporting a child with EBSA it's tiresome to say the least to see yet more scrabbling around to blame parents some more instead of anyone looking into the real reasons why so many children struggle to attend school. My autistic DD has attendance at 50% and it has been an endless fight to get any support in place. DH and I work full time outside the home and are desperate for her to be able to attend school.

Over 90% of children with emotional distress around school are ND https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37810599 so why is there never any discussion about how to make school more accessible for those students? It's constant banging on about lazy parents and term-time holidays.

I grew up with mum wfh as she had her own business and a father swho worked 4 on 4 off then reversed for nights. They both consequently had a lot of time at home together Monday to Friday.

I went to school and that was that. Obviously if I was off sick someone was usually at home.

I think that it's easier to keep children home if there's someone working & able to look after them.

I think school refusal is more to do with all the constant testing & focus on progress. Lots of children (and not all with SEN) will find this draining. I've been teaching since the early 2000s and it was far more relaxed for students. It was easier to get a pass grade but equally if they didn't pass it wasn't the end of the world.

Michael Gove is partly to blame for making school such a miserable place for some students

https://www.schoolmanagementplus.com/assessment/the-impact-of-the-govian-reforms-has-been-unremittingly-negative/

This is an old article but highlights that Gove's reforms have contributed to mental health issues in students.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jul/04/michael-gove-ignored-school-pupils-mental-illness?CMP=ShareiOSAppp_Other

I can't recall more than a handful of students in the early 2000s with anxiety - just the usual nerves before an exam. Nowadays students seem fraught with anxiety to the extent that they need a time out card, can't sit in an exam room, need to sit near a door & so on. Maybe the stakes seem higher & so it's created this situation. So sometimes they just don’t want to go in.

I also agree that in the old days staying home was fairly boring - an afternoon with a comic, daytime TV & some lucozade was about as good as it got. Now they can play Xbox, scroll TikTok, Netflix etc... so I don't think this is anything to do with parents wfh.

@Antsinmypantsneedtodance

He can stroll in whenever he gets there and leave when he needs to. No one watching over him. That is the modern reality of work. Schools however haven't caught up. They're no longer preparing children for the workplace as it is and as such we're creating a generation of young people who can't think for themselves or balance their own work and self motivate.

In all honesty this would be really difficult to manage in a school. You can't really have a place where 14 year olds can come & go as they please. They'd all be hiding in the locker rooms having a chat/vaping/making TikToks if they had the chance. Also loads of jobs don't operate like this. Can you imagine running a busy restaurant and not knowing when the chef would rock up - or a salon with customers booked in. I think the freedom some people have with work is not the norm. It's usually higher earners who have this luxury too. So it's not necessarily the real world for many people.

This.

Sunglasses don't cause skin cancer but people needing to wear sunglasses a lot and higher incidence of skin cancer will be strongly correlated.

There is also the issue that parents of school refusers will be more likely to opt to work from home where there is a choice.

Whilst there is plenty of evidence that parents working away from the home means kids are in school when they shouldn't be (ie too ill), I am not sure the opposite is true other than someone spotting a corrolation between a rise in WFH and a rise in school refusal. When I went to school, most children had SAHMs and school attendance was good, but there was no over-stuffed curriculum, considerably less exam pressures and schools were not rated on how well the students performed academically. It is school stress that causes school refusal/absenteeism, not dad in the study on his laptop.