Headteachers should drive to the homes of absent pupils and get them into school

[Amuseaboosh]

Headteachers "have a duty" to drive to the homes of absent pupils and bring them into school, the education secretary has said.

Gillian Keegan said levels of absence in schools were now "a crisis," with recent figures revealing that 125,000 pupils spent more time out of class than in.

I know how very lucky I am to have never had to cope with any of my children not wanting to go to school.
However, I'm not so ignorant that I believe that all the parents dealing with this issue haven't tried absolutely everything to get their child into school. Where is ANY member of teaching staff supposed to find the time to attend to 125,000 pupils in person to get them to come to school?

AIBU in thinking Gillian is out of touch and ignorant? Or can someone see wisdom here that I cannot?

Completely agree.
Gillian Keegan chooses not to look at the bigger picture of why children and young people are ‘refusing’ to go to school.
Unfortunately, services such as CAMHS have been underfunded for so long that they can’t cope with needs.

I do agree that we need to let non-academic kids move onto vocational studies a lot earlier. Have them do maths, English and science GCSEs and everything else can be vocationally based.

Oh Jesus Christ @Florenz READ THE THREAD.

Read every single post by parents who have lived through this, who are still going through this.

But you keep coming back and digging your heels in with your opinion that has no basis in fact!

So many people not reading the thread.

Either read the thread or keep your ignorant comments to yourself.

I hope none of you have rl friends or family going through this. If you do I feel sorry for them.

It is not bad parenting, it is not lack of discipline, it is not children being brought up badly.

It is schools no longer meeting the needs of vulnerable pupils, those with SN (diagnosed or not), with MH issues. The pressure put on children in schools is much more intense than it ever was. The whole system is no longer fit for purpose. Many children struggle now. 20 years ago schools were more relaxed about attendance (tbh 12 years ago they were - DS’s HT in primary school authorised him being off for the last 2 weeks of Christmas term because it was all too much for him - no HT could do that now!), about academic attainment, about ticking government mandated boxes.

Read the thread and educate yourself.

@Florenz

I bought my child up to prioritise education. I’m a teacher. She knows this. All her family have at the minimum a degree and most higher than this. She KNOWS!

She still won’t go to school. It’s not defiance it’s fear. I wish more than ANYTHING she’d go to school. She got 9 GCSE’s grades 7 and 8’s. How do you think l feel? It’s been the most stressful and horrible time of my life. When we tried to gently push her in she seriously self harmed.

She’s got ASD burnout and anxiety. How do l drag my 5ft 11 Dd into school?! She’s bigger than me.

Stop making assumptions about things you have no experience of. I never thought a year ago l’d be in this situation. Her mental health is too fragile. I’ve paid 800 quid to see a private child psychiatrist. Is this the profile of someone who doesn’t care that their child won’t go to school?

lm fucking distraught about it.

We tried to get this for my oldest son, but because he was underperforming academically he wasn’t able to do less academic subjects, which is so arse backwards it’s untrue!

He was deregistered at 15 because he was so depressed and suicidal he couldn’t talk.

Schools need to be overhauled. Policies need to be child friendly - they’re schools ffs! They’re less child friendly than adult work places 🤦🏼‍♀️

It depends what you mean by "child friendly". They are there to educate, to mold children into young adults ready to make their way in the world.

It’s mould not mold. That’s the stuff that grows on walls. Although there’s plenty of it in schools.

Sounds like your ‘moulding’ failed to differentiate between a verb and a noun.

Not sure I'd include science in the list. Functional maths, English language and communication, and a couple of others that they feel are relevant and accessible. But that's not really the point if this thread .
What I came back to say was, like the pp, for the brief time my DD was unable to attend it completely turned MY life upside down. It was hell, caused me difficulties at work, took a huge emotional toll. I know parents who have had to sacrifice their careers, their relationships, their financial security to deal as best they can with a child who can't just slot in to the one size fits no-one system. It's not parents that don't care or who can't be arsed who are doing this. @Florenz and others, do you really think if it was as simple as "making them go" we wouldn't do that?

@Florenz actually I would say school is primarily for academic education. It's the parents job to help mould them into adults that can successfully interact with the world. Fortunately, for adults, that are a million ways to do this with varying degrees of interaction and compliance required. In schools there's pretty much one way or the highway...except they penalise and demonise those who cannot get on the "one way". Parents with children who cannot access school, frequently, after years, find them a college placeyot alternative provision that does suit them and allows them to progress but it's a huge, draining battle and shouldn't be.

tell me how do we ‘mold’ a child by breaking them?

I strongly suspect you’re the kind of poster who thinks autism could be cured with a good hiding.

Neurodiverse children, in particular, are failed by our education system. The way the brain works should be seen as an asset, there is a reason why employers like NASA actively seek neurodiverse candidates but rather than embracing that in education we fail our young people with our education system. It’s a travesty.

A study should be done in the correlation between neurodiversity and school refusal, I think the results would be very telling.

They’re not doing that very well now are they…

When I was bedridden after having broken my spine and subsequently developed ME as a child (to the point of having to go to the toilet in a bucket, and have bedbaths) I had someone from the local authority force their way into my bedroom and physically try to drag me out of bed to "make me" go to school. Which inflicted huge trauma and lifelong fear of authorities, not to mention could have caused paralysis.

I WANTED to go to school. I was extremely academic and adored school (later went on to get a PhD so clearly academic), if the LEA had given me study materials so I could do my schoolwork at home, or given me a tutor, or even found me a place in a school that was wheelchair accessible and let me come to school in a wheelchair, my education wouldn't have been completely disrupted the way it was. I begged and my parents begged for me to be allowed to study at home, but that was refused.

Instead I was punished and brutalised for being physically ill and told I either had to do this extremely physically demanding thing with no disability access accommodation ("climb three flights of stairs or you're not allowed to go to school!!) or my parents would be forced under threat of prosecution to home educate.

Education authorities don't give a shit about kids, they just want conformity at all costs and to punish anyone who can't or won't comply.

Yes, I completely agree with this. I do a lot of work in this area and it's shocking how badly ND youth are failed by educational systems.

to mold children into young adults ready to make their way in the world.

Schools exist to produce the next generation of workers for the machine. That’s it. They aren’t there to care for the children. They aren’t there to raise them. They should stay in there Lane and let the parents do the parenting and then everybody would probably be a lot happier.

Does anyone else not remember a single case of ‘school refusing’ when they were at school themselves? At least nothing beyond bunking off the last day of term if you were an off the rails teen. And no it wasn’t ‘going on all around me, I just didn’t know it’ - had pupils suddenly vanished from school we would’ve noticed! They all turned up! What is happening to our young people? I have 2 smalls and find this all so worrying.

I’m 38 and we had some persistent absentees, yes. A girl in my class just stopped turning up, when she was about 15. Turned out she was suffering from severe depression and didn’t leave her room for weeks at a time. I actually bumped into her mum recently and she’s doing well know.

Well that’s 1 person. I think we need to stop burying our heads in the sand that nothings changed and ‘we just didn’t hear about it back then’. Something really has changed in our teens/kids, we need to find out what.

There needs to be more creativity about alternative provision and this has got to come from the government - rather than trying to force school refusers to attend and expecting schools to magic up the resources to succeed in providing individualised education for all those who need it.

Well I said a few, that was just one full example I gave.

This has been addressed many times in this thread.

Schools have changed. They are far more difficult for ND pupils to access. They put more pressure on pupils than they ever did. They acknowledge that MH issues are at an all time high amongst children but fail to acknowledge that they are a big part of the problem.

I was at school in the 80s and early 90s. School then wasn’t comparable to school now.
And there were truants - I knew several who missed months of school a year - with hindsight all were ND. All now have jobs.

School is the problem here. Not parents, not children.

@Sweetashunni its as @Howls says.primary SATs are dreadful for ND kids. They actively put dyslexic kids at a disadvantage.

Add to that increased classroom sizes, less special schools , more sensory challenges , Covid and you’ve got a perfect storm.

I remember doing GCSEs in the very early 90s - we were given the lessons, we were told to revise, and that was it. Not this intense micromanagement that goes on now.

Dd’s first day of gcse year was a day of countdowns to the second of how much time they had to work, they were shown photos of the isolation room and told that anyone not progressing would be there day in day out until they improve their work. They were told they should be doing at least 4 hours of revision per day.
As the year went on they didn’t just do mocks in January, they did them every 2 weeks - full exam conditions.
Results wise this school did quite well, but it came at a high cost - a very high rate of pupils having breakdowns (dd included), a high rate of school refusal, a high rate suspended and excluded. Many pupils at that school end up completely disengaging from education altogether. An academy, in case you haven’t guessed.

None of that happened 30 years ago. No wonder so many pupils can’t cope.

@howls and you dont get that nonsense at private school who produce better exam results overall