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.

WFH has become more normal since people had to do it during the pandemic. Not going to school every day was also normalised for a cohort of children who had to stay home during the pandemic. That doesn't mean more WFH caused more school refusal, it means the pandemic caused both.

Correlation is not causation.

WFH might contribute a little to some.

What do parents and kids think is going to happen when they enter the work force? Assuming they do.

Do they think that suddenly after they finish school that work are going to think about their happiness? Let them have days off? Bearing in mind you go from 13 weeks off a year to 5.

Or they don't like crowded buses on they way in or photocopying a document 30 times is so boring?

They are your children get them to school. No it's not great for many but their working lives are going to be much less great if they don't go, and you are a long time adult.

What happens next? They see some friends, who do manage to get to school and do a bit of homework, progress more in work, earn more, move away, go places, then it's still what? Unfair? Or they get depressed?

Most average human beings have to do things they don't want to.

The world the current children are entering is far more unpredictable than other times in living memory. AI can be used for much good but it's also going to cause huge problems.

There are many new developments and problems to sort out and it will be our kids who will have to do it.

So you can make excuse after excuse or you can build resilience and ambition. Tell them to take whatever they can from school if they are having a hard time.

Having the time, and in fact your main activity, learning new stuff is not that much of a hardship in the grand scheme of things.

Learning how to behave in class, manners, respect for those teaching you and looking after the building you are in, working with others you don't personally like, navigating bullies or making sure you aren't a bully yourself, acceptance for others who may seem different but finding the things which you are the same. This is what you do.

Parents need to stop making excuses for their failings. That would help. In the end it's your kids who will gain the benefits or not as the case may be.

I expect there will be a pile on about SEN students, but what is the alternative? Main stream school needs to work for the majority. If a SEN student cannot cope or the school cannot accommodate their needs perhaps online home schooling is for them, instead of pushing for a main stream solution that just isn't there.

Our eldest has never had the best time at school, it has taken years of heartbreaking, resilience building from us, his parents, to get him through. It's almost done now. He's 16, going into GCSEs and has started to appreciate everything we did for him, some of which did not make him happy at the time and it was hard to do.

So yes you get them into school
Or if school is not the right environment for them or others around them use the internet in a positive way and sort out an alternative form of education.

It's our job as parents to get our children in school with the behaviour to learn. Schools can only do so much.

I wfh and get dressed to work everyday. My children rarely miss any school and have to have much more than a cold to stay home.
I think you'll find that the parents who are wfh do not want their children there all day, to enable them to work.
It is a different kind of parent who lets their children miss school at the drop of a hat. They are the kids at my school who are always late and being chased down the road by a dishevelled barely dressed parent with a can of monster in their hand. That parent has never done a days work in their life.

Perhaps having 13 weeks off school a year isn't helping and the children shouldn't have such long periods of time away from education and going to school - so scrap the 6 weeks summer break and make the longest break two weeks

Some parents have indeed different priorities. Like their kid still being alive at the end of the week/month/year rather than a headline and a glib comment if "poor dear, I wonder what went wrong".

So kids who are struggling in school should spend even more time in school? Like some form of aversion therapy or something?

Yeah. Starting from 4. Crush that spirit nice and young.

I think if we're going to compare work and school like so many do on these threads we should do it properly. Often people say 'how will they cope with work if you don't make them go to school?!' like these are the same environments. Unless you're a teacher, they're not.

Imagine you go to work somewhere where the buildings are dilapidated, there's chewing gum stuck to the underneath of the tables and broken furniture and or equipment.
The office you're in is relatively small with a lot of people crammed into that space.
You try to work but a small but significant minority of people in your office are shouting across the room at each other and throwing things.
You have a query on one area of your work but your supervisor is busy trying to get the other people in the room to quieten down and do some work so you can't ask for help.
You need the toilet but you have to ask for a pass because they're locked and when you do go, there is somebody outside the door supervising and you know if you're not quick they'll be asking you what you're doing in there.
Despite your best efforts you haven't made a lot of friends at work and a couple of them seem to go out of their way to laugh at your appearance.
You're not allowed to leave the site on your lunch break. Your choices are to sit outside in the cold or sit in a noisy, crowded hall with hundreds of other people.
You have regular performance reviews in the form of constant tests. These are stressful and often your colleagues are made aware of how you've performed in them.

I have to say, if my work environment was anything like my kids school environment I'd be resigning!!

The strongest correlation I've seen is between the new obsession with attendance and the ramped up ability to impose fines. It's a nice little earner for the authorities so they are only going to require more and more attendance (they were talking about increasing school time too) and hound people almost to death over it.

Sorry but I think this is a crass oversimplification. WFH appeals to me because I don’t want to spend upwards of £4,000 a year and two and half hours a day on trains. It appeals to me because I don’t want my very young DC in nursery from the minute it opens until the minute it closes. And I could hardly afford the extra nursery hours AND the travel to the office even if I thought that was an appealing way to live.

Valuing that over some office chit-chat and keeping Pret in business isn’t “wanting to stay home in a quiet environment.”

This honestly feels like the latest in a long line of blaming WFH for all of society’s ills instead of accepting that we really need a radical rethink of the way things work in this country.

I don't really understand why children would think this way, it just sounds like an excuse.

My mum was a single parent without a job and I went to school every single day. I knew she stayed at home every day looking after my sister, it didn't occur to me even once that I should stay at home because I had to go to school.

That was my role, and I understood from age 4 that we had different roles. In the same way that her role was to cook and clean and I wouldn't do that because I was a young child.

We don't say that kids of stay at home parents have a worse attendance record in general, I don't see why that would be any different with wfh.

I kind of agree and disagree. I do agree women have to justify their choices more and that WFH largely helps mothers more than fathers (although not always - I have no option to WFH where as DH works flexibly and does more childcare). But yes, attacking flexible working is primarily attacking working mothers.

But I think this notion of WFH is the reason why kids are school refusing is more of a bullshit attempt to blame parents for failing public services, as opposed to a direct attack on women. Schools are utterly catastrophic for a lot of DC. SEN support is woeful (and this government wants to strip it back further). Buildings are falling apart. Bullying is rife. Teachers are leaving in droves.

In a way, it’s probably a worsening of what has been there for decades. I know my experience of secondary school was horrendous. School refusal just wasn’t an option then though, we were dragged in, utterly miserable, fearing the bullies, didn’t achieve our potential and paid for our experiences way into adult life. Maybe parents just don’t want that for their DC now. I can hardly blame them.

Exactly this.

WFH makes it much easier for women to juggle motherhood and a career. So it’s surprising, or possibly not, to see it viewed with so much suspicion.

if school is not the right environment for them or others around them use the internet in a positive way and sort out an alternative form of education

Because it's just that easy?? Alternative provision is nigh on impossible to get, even if you manage to spend years getting the ever-elusive EHCP.

Yes I know that and main stream school is never going to work for them. There was a time we thought it wasn't going to work for our eldest, we were prepared to move house, home school, online school, borrow for private school, if we couldn't see any improvement.

We shed many tears over his mental and emotional state for many years. He told us he had written 'goodbye' letters to us before he was old enough to really understand what those feelings were.

I didn't leave his school tie, or belts in his room, we checked his sheets for blood in case of self harm.
It was fucking awful for 5 years almost solid.

But there is only so much a stare school with x100s of other kids can do.

Yes I totally agree with your latter point. It's almost Simpsons-esque isn't it? It can't be the system that's wrong, it must be those pesky people who are using it.

You make an interesting point over the generational impacts of schooling in the past - I hadn't made the link between parents who are both more emotionally involved with their children and had a terrible experience of school and how they parent their own children through bad experiences at school. Real food for thought, thank you.

Utter rubbish, this is like saying that speed cameras are a means of police financing when in fact they are there to catch dangerous, irresponsible drivers and save lives. Local authorities want fit, able and competent residents who contribute to society, and the driving force behind examining attendance is to ensure children have access to education to help them achieve this along with the appalling fact that poor attendance can be a huge safeguarding red flag.

As for schools being toxic environments with bullying problems, this has been going on since schools were introduced in medieval times and is particularly well-documented in writing from Georgian and Victorian periods. That's obviously not to say that it's right, but the lack of resilience amongst some of the current generation of school and university-aged young people is shocking and doesn't bode well for either them as an invested workforce or for those who will rely on workforce-generated taxation in old age.

I saw an article about this in some rag and I think it is certainly more about school culture not being inclusive, particularly in secondary school where it is largely only a pleasant experience for a tiny minority who are either really geeky and just love rules etc. or popular kids whose whole identity is based upon meeting their friends at school and messing around/walking around the school in lesson time! It was the same when I was at school in the 90s except the popular truanting kids did so off the premises. Things only get better for regular kids who are clever but not obsessed with being obedient when they get to the sixth form college model, I think that is because expression of one's personality is allowed.

I work in a hybrid set up and DH occasionally WFH but we are both up, dressed as ready for meetings on Teams so don't have a choice. It has helped in our case where I have got my eldest to college on time.

And in sixth form college the teachers are back to being caring about pastoral issues like in junior and infant school.

Honestly the fact this comes from Ofsted sums it up .

schools are too prescriptive and therefore many children with Sen’s struggle with school .

schools are so much more oppressive than they used to be .

blaming the parents is a frequent Ofsted game - pressuring kids to come in for registration when they have hospital appointments is an Ofsted issue.

f anyone remembers trying to homeschool and work .. I can guarantee they wouldn’t want your kids home when working .

What about stay at home parents? Feels like people wfh always get bashed one way or another. Yes I work from home a lot and I'm not suited and booted but my child knows I work hard and am on calls all day etc and I get up every morning and get dressed and go to work, who cares that the work is done from home.

I don’t think it’s the whole picture, as I think school refusal is a really complex issue (no matter what the head of Ofsted says). But state secondary schools in the 90s/early 00s were often horrendous, especially for girls. It was a product of the time, with heavy ‘lad’ culture and rampant misogyny. Mine wasn’t even a ‘bad’ school but, despite this, bullying was rife and low level sexual assault sadly wasn’t uncommon. I don’t have daughters or teens but I would do my utmost for them not to experience this.

lol such lies and nonsense and false correlations. My dad worked from home in the 90s and it never stopped anyone going to school. We did have a massive pandemic recently though which might have suggested to people that school was less mandatory than they’d previously realised. So annoying to hear this crap really.

Actually, my DD used to whine about going in on my WFH days in Infant school.

I always told her that school was non-negotiable, that I wouldn't be able to work with her at home with me and then I wouldn't earn any money for nice things, food or a house and ultimately, we all have to do things we don't want to do!

If there is a correlation (and I can't see it, myself - who wants their kids hanging around, bored all day and whinging while you're trying to work?!), it's weak parenting, not WFH that's to blame.

Just another excuse to try and get everyone back into an office environment.

I think on borderline days it is easier to keep them home now if you can wfh rather than dosing them up, packing them off and feeling guilty. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I have a very reluctant/potential school refusing yr 5 with asd. So far I have managed to get her in every time unless she's been ill and I've made a decision to keep her off, but it's very challenging.

She often asks if I'm going to the office or going to be at home and it definitely helps her "get on with it" if I say I'm sorry you can't stay home there's no one there, I have to go to the office.