Children's Commissioner talks bollocks

[JustAnotherRandom]

'We can achieve 100% attendance, but only if we work together.'

How is 100% attendance realistically achievable?! What absolute bollocks is this?

YANBU - perfectly achievable
YABU - not achievable (even without covid, bullying, unmet SEN or mental health issues)

No idea how to enable voting.

Ha ha. Yeah my ASD Dd won’t attend school as it overwhelmed her. Maybe address SEND issues in schools first properly.

Sorry, my YANBU and YABU are back to front. For clarity, my view is the commissioner is talking bollocks and children are much further down her list than they should be for someone in her position.

What about normal childhood illnesses?

She's just speaking soundbite nonsense.

Exactly. Illnesses which if people take her advice on board will lead to more overall sickness through pressure to send kids in sick to spread to other kids!

That will be delightful when most of the class goes down with D&V at the same time.

I don’t get the obsession with 100% attendance. Of course attendance is important, and setting up children for work is no bad thing...but adults get sick and don’t go work. They have personal crises. Obviously you can go too far the other way, but nobody cares about such things post-school. Nobody wants the coughing and sneezing martyr next to them at work.

Yabu. She's never met any children or been in a school has she.

Little Johnny has just shat on the circle time carpet and all teaching staff are deployed sprinkling that weird sand on puddles of vomit but at least we have 100% attendance!

I’m so bored of all this attendance bollocks.

People get sick, some more than others. The idea that that’s a controversial notion is so unbelievably tiresome.

Neither achievable nor desirable ffs. 100% attendance means many children in school who shouldn't be there for a range of perfectly good reasons.

I blame Katharine Birbalsingh and her cohort of gnashing narcissistic weirdos - academy chain superheads with no feeling for teaching and a corporate attitude to school management - who have a stranglehold on British educational thinking. Nothing they have done has been for the benefit of children, and much of it actively harmful. They should fuck off back to the City and leave education to people who care about kids.

@JustAnotherRandom

Sorry - obviously I agree with you OP - sick of the bollocks talk - not your post.

I have two very healthy DC (to the point where it has been commented upon by their Academy school) and they don’t manage 100%. What nonsense! Good grief!

@Greensleeves

I blame Katharine Birbalsingh and her cohort of gnashing narcissistic weirdos - academy chain superheads with no feeling for teaching and a corporate attitude to school management - who have a stranglehold on British educational thinking. Nothing they have done has been for the benefit of children, and much of it actively harmful. They should fuck off back to the City and leave education to people who care about kids.

Christ it’s like you’re in my head - could not agree more.

Why are they suddenly obsessed with attendance? I don't remember the government / schools being so obsessed when I was at school.

100% will never be possible for my son, he attends two specialist medical clinics twice a year. One is only the first Monday 9-12 of the month as it's a visiting doctor, and one is a Friday morning 9-1.

So he will always need 4 mornings a year minimum and appointments are explained absence and still count as demerits on attendance.

The fact he also had chickenpox last year and took 7 school days off was enough to get me a letter sent home!

Ds finally understands why he never gets the 100% attendance badges, but it will always leave a sour taste in my mouth at end of term assembly.

I work in Education linked with Attendance and it's just not possible that avoid absence due to ill health whether physical or mental.
Even without considering SEN/school avoidance etc you will always get kids who are poorly. My kid had chicken pox so that was a week off. My other kid had gastroenteritis so that was 48 hours off from the last bout. I'm pretty lucky in that neither of my kids are troubled by the asthma and allergies that impacted my school attendance 35 years ago. Not have they smashed their head off a curb resulting in a concussion and a week as an inpatient.

Kids who regularly aren't taken to school by their parents (primary age) and teenagers who regularly truant, well their missing school is often a sign of something bigger going on and just asking a child who is involved in county lines or being kept off school to be a young carer or who has no adult to wake them up and walk them to their Year 1 classroom...well attendance is just a symptom of a much bigger issue.

Has no one learnt anything from the pandemic. Going out and mixing with lots of other people when you are unwell with a contagious illness is not OK.

One of my children has SEN and last school year suffered autistic burnout. It's resulted in low attendance after always having been above 96%. Being made to stay in school after actually being sick is one of the factors that contributed to the burnout.

My 6 year old DS has suffered recurrent tonsillitis the past two winters, always extremely poorly, often hospitalised and almost always off for at least a week each bout. I would love nothing more than he be healthy enough to not need time off school. The stress, anxiety and not to mention the loss of earnings is not something I choose. The 100% attendance enforcers and the prizes and treats children receive for being lucky enough not to get unwell/go in when unwell and cause other children to get ill absolutely drive me up the wall

Absolutely ridiculous. Even a really bad cold can make you feel absolutely miserable and in need of a day on the couch.

You want attendance, make it a place to want to go to.

I don't know how anyone takes her seriously with her background of off-rolling. I mean how did she even get that role?

🙌🏻

Even if you (stupidly) ignore SEN and disabilities and long term conditions that need hospital appointments, has this woman never heard of D&V? Chickenpox? Appendicitis? Broken bones? Funerals?

It's almost comical how stupid she sounds.

Because attendance post-covid is shit. Catastrophically shit. Particularly for disadvantaged kids. It’s actually a national crisis but they don’t understand the reasons for it therefore their solutions are bollocks.

They do understand many of the reasons but don't want to fix the fundamental problems around poverty , mental and physical health and lack of hope