Are that many parents relaxed about school attendance?

[Orangeandgold]

I went into the office and my colleague was ranting about her children. Both are teens, one in year 10 or 11 (GCSE years) and they convinced her that they do not need to go to school because of the train strikes (this was a few weeks ago).

I asked her if her children’s school was local and if they could have taken the bus instead. She said they could have taken the bus or even walked but they were stressing her out and she had a big meeting at work and so she’s let them stay at home. She was fined a few months ago because they didn’t go into school. She’s started keeping emergency funds for fines because her children’s attendance isn’t great.

This can’t be “the new normal” now. I’ve heard other stories from mum friends that arnt that bothered. Another friend pulled her teen out of school to attend a baby scan.

I understand people have “lost trust” in the education system etc. But AIBU for thinking that parents should really make the effort to get their children to school.

Growing up it was such a big deal for parents to do this. Unless my DD is ill she has to go in and if she is unhappy about something I will speak directly to teachers/headteachers/relevant parents to sort it out.

Thanks so much for your help with this Mumsnet Towers! I'm very grateful!

@HotAndColdAndBackAgain the running seems more appealing every time we have a bust up about the kids. I’m of an age where if I have kids I’m thinking now is my latest and I’d struggle to have a kid with him being so misaligned to my views on correct parenting. It’s a constant frustration. I don’t know if I will stay much longer tbh

Prior to the exam years I have always been relaxed about taking mine out for holidays. Now the eldest is in S4 we've knocked cheap holidays on the head.

We don't do birthdays or duvet days or that sort of thing.

We are in Scotland so no fines or anything of that palava.

🙄

Firstly, school as a child is very different to work as an adult. It doesn’t always follow that kids that have lower attendance due to mental health issues caused by specific things in the school environment, go on to struggle in the same way at work. Many of the issues that cause problems at school are not in the workplace.

Secondly, for parents like the pp with a child with mental health issues, and those of us with ND kids, we sometimes just have to do what makes our children be ok right now and not worry too much about the long term plan. Pushing a child to go to school who is very anxious or depressed isn’t always the right thing to do and can do more harm than good. Sometimes the harm is so bad, there’s no coming back from it.

Your post shows a lack of understanding, whether that is genuine or deliberate, I’m not sure.

I am older than the op and when I were a lass, my mum was at home all day (not working- she was a longterm sahm). I wouldn't have been able to bunk off and never did. Not even once 🤓. If I'd just stayed home (and wasn't ill) she'd have found jobs for me to do in the house probably.

Most families can't afford to have one parent at home, not working anymore. I wonder if that's something to do with it.

Even if my mum hadn't been home, one of the several other housewives in our street would have noticed the house was occupied and would have told my mum.

@EG94 I think you’re right to be cautious about having children with him. Having children with someone that doesn’t share you values is signing yourself up to a difficult and probably miserable life.

At the moment his parenting is his issue, they’re not your kids and as much as I’m sure you like/love them, you can just think whatever. When they’re your kids, you’re going to really care about him not being a good and proactive dad and it’ll feel so much worse.

It sounds like you have a decision to make. I would say do make the decision one way or the other, you’ll regret just drifting along with him. 💐

Illness is prime reason again. www.gov.scot/publications/summary-statistics-for-schools-in-scotland-2023/pages/attendance-and-absence/#:~:text=The%20overall%20attendance%20rate%20for,93.7%25%20in%202014%2F15.

I totally agree with this.

So many expectations put on children as if they are mini adults. There’s almost an obsession with ‘getting them ready for the world of work’ or ‘adult life’ which overlooks the fact that they only get one childhood and that a lot of childhood today especially is so tightly controlled and dictated to by adults.

Young people have so little autonomy or sovereignty over their lives. It’s no wonder they’re so disengaged by teenage years. But we know best.

I let my DD have an odd day off but only as she’s an A* student and actually could leave right now and still get top grades at GCSE. Her attendance dropped to 70% in year 8-9 because of a health issue caused by puberty, she had it tough so I’m super proud of her that she’s excelled and is doing so well. I know she doesn’t find school easy being naturally introverted but school is pretty much non negotiable 95% of the time and she wouldn’t ask for more than an odd day off (birthday this year and I’ve agreed as day before Easter hols and she is hardly struggling and maybe an odd day here and there).

Attendance statistics weren't a thing decades ago. My parents expected me to go to school, but if I was ill my mum would tell me to stay off for an extra day to make sure I was fully recovered. Until I went to secondary school, they took me out of school for a week in June so we could have a two week holiday (including half term)

I started teaching in the 80s. I was working in a very impoverished area. Persistent absence for some was common. A day when all children were present was highly unusual. Some children I barely ever saw. No one did anything about it, as I recall.

The push for high attendance is relatively recent. Fines very recent. Whilst I do believe children should not miss school unless they are unwell, it's all got a bit OTT. Families just lie more and say their child is ill when really they are on holiday, so now they are asking for 'proof' of illness.

At secondary in the 90s, quite a number of pupils pretty much disappeared and were only sporadically seen from about y10. There didn't seem to be many questions asked.

That's a lot harder to get away with now. You can't nip out between lessons as easily with computer based registration every lesson and sites are more secure. Questions are asked pretty quickly when attendance statistics drop even by relatively small margins.

A greater issue now is inflexibility over health issues and disability. "High functioning" neurodiversity is more likely to be problematic in highly pressured environments. Secondary education is more intense than it was, and for intelligent students who don't cope with mainstream schools there is often no other choice between wading through or home education. The range of needs in schools has grown and the support level and range of acceptable learing outcomes (vocational subjects, skills based learning) has often been withdrawn due to funding and target culture.

Access to GPs, out patient care and waiting lists drag out health issues. It's very difficult to get timely support for anything requiring medical assistance and health issues can often deteriorate. Society can be very unforgiving of some health condtions in children that are associated with adults. Children often have fewer treatment options too. Some chronic health conditions are often under-estimated in their impact as well.

Attendance is important and that's best optimised with a problem solving and understanding approach rather than punitive. Also the standard process of recording a lateness e.g. for a medical appointment as an absence when the child has attended most of the session is unhelpful and demotivating.

The vast majority of the time persistant absence is an indicator of an underlying problem rather than purely a lack of care.

More kids want days off possibly now.
Covid can't have helped. And the gcse pressure is huge. Much easier in my day.
Be kind to a mum under pressure. And just encourage her to stand up to her kids.
I wouldn't pay fines.

My younger kids are both at college now. Apart from Covid the youngest has never had a day off of school or college, my middle child had 2 or 3 days off, the oldest had more because he has epilepsy and stayed home if he had a seizure. I was never militant about attendance but they’re very rarely ill and there was no other reason to stay off. I only remember a few kids having lots of time off but it wasn’t the norm.

It was completely normal to bunk off school when I was growing up (80s, 90s). There's nothing wrong with missing bits here and there if you're doing ok anyway. It was when the government started fining parents and putting them in prison it became a worry.

@EG94 thats tough. A friend of mine is co-parenting 50/50 and the dad pulled the son out of school without any plans for homeschooling and she is besides herself. It’s insane how difficult one parent can make such a situation. She’s getting support to get their son back into school but as a family they are reviving zero support and have been told to “get on the waiting list”

I know teachers and staff are stretched but I can see how the lack of support for families and children that need it can cause lots of distrust.

100% attendance awards and the like are all utter bollocks. Ultimately, I as the parent decide.

However I do think that post covid, weak parents are at a loss as to how to get their high school age children to school.

I was in school in the 70s and 80s and kids missed school for all sorts of things. There was little attention paid to it. So long as you brought in a note from your parents it didn’t really matter what the real reason was. 20 “Raw had a headache so didn’t come into school yesterday.” notes would not have drawn much attention from the authorities (even if the signature looked like it was a left handed copy by a teenager).

I had a friend whose mum regular wrote notes excusing her from school so she could practice for dance competitions (she wasn’t particularly good). Another mum just wrote one when ever her son didn’t want to go in.

My mum left for work before I was up, so if I told her I was sick that day she wrote a note for me (I only lied a couple of times).

I think people in work who left school in the late 90s onwards tend to be much more prepared to take a sickie at work than people of my generation, though. Which seems like it’s the wrong way round to me!

This.

I never took my kids out of school to go on holidays before covid but have done since and will continue to do so.

The trust has been broken. When my kids returned to school, I was very much on top of their work and was shocked at how little they did in school - at both the inexperienced but enthusiastic ones and the very experienced but minimum teaching ones . An hour of bite size and an hour of decent and interesting Outschool classes would easily cover their entire day and achieve more.

Yep this 👆

My mum used to let me 'wag' the occasional Friday in about Y10 because we had double PE and double Art that day. We also had double maths but I was good at that, so it was a low value day.

That was 45 years ago however.

Re. SEN, a good school with excellent communication with parents will develop an understanding of when a child begins to need extra support due to an underlying problem that could be causing anxiety.

For two years we fought to be heard by our 7yo dd's school (well, her senco and class teacher) and were always met with "no problems when she's here, she's fine at school". It took an extended period of school avoidance and my mental breakdown before anyone began to listen and understand. We finally got our dd's ehcp before Christmas, having had the Ed Psych confirm that our dd is not, as it happens, fine at school. Thankfully she has a brilliant teacher this year and is doing very well. She is academically very able. She is awaiting assessment for ND.

Ds is at secondary school. Again, always academically able. But he's begun to say he hates school, feels 'drained' etc. His school is well known in the area for it's effective SEN support. He'd seen a presentation in assembley about adhd and it struck a chord with him as he'd begun getting into trouble with low level stuff in the classroom - talkative, fidgety, easily distracted etc. He's always been a 'coper' but was beginning to get stomach aches and diarrhoea on Sunday evenings. I contacted his pastoral care person and my experience could not have been more different to the one with our daughter. She said then last thing the school wants is for ds to start being absent, and they were grateful I'd started communicating with them early about how ds felt. She's arranging a meeting with his senior tutor but said that even without a formal diagnosis there's a range of things they can do to support him. She spoke about different curves for different children - curve 1 for kids who are showing some symptoms of nd but who don't have a diagnosis, moving up to curves 2 and 3 for those with more obvious difficulties requiring a ramping up of support. It's likely that they'll sit my ds at the front of classes, allow him to have a fidget toy (which was noted by his French teacher to help him focus, a number of months ago) and a time out card he can use once a day when he's experiencing overwhelm. I am hopeful this approach might also lead to his English teacher stopping telling him to "think faster" and "write quicker", which for a child with likely adhd is both anxiety inducing and likely impossible until they're receiving extra support.

Never underestimate the importance of an excellent teacher, too. It really does make a huge difference to be understood and well supported. If kids are so anxious about their environment, they're not ready to learn and won't take anything in anyway - regardless of whether they are present or absent. Even our family case worker stated that.

If people had actually read my post they would have seen that I was referring to somebody who had a NT child who just didn’t really like school
and so she let her stay at home a lot and she reassured herself that her daughter was still learning her GCSEs through bitesize and YouTube. Right, ok.

It’s interesting how defensive people get about this. I have sympathy for parents of children who are autistic and struggle and of course there will always be exceptions to the rule. But as a very experienced education professional with 25+ years secondary teaching I am telling you a fact: low attendance leads to lower grades leads to poorer post 16/18 outcomes. I’m
not judging. I’m stating a fact.

Of course there will always be those who say ‘well my cousin’s friend’s sister stayed at home and got into Cambridge’ etc. As I said, exceptions to the rule. Generally, children should be in school.

Another thing I would say is that low attendance is a big safeguarding concern. Schools are instructed to look into it. Look at all the horrible stories in the news over the last few years regarding children. Non/poor attendance was often a reason the school couldn’t notice anything. (I’m not saying all children with low attendance are at risk - that’s not what I’m saying - just that it is a safeguarding flag that schools have a duty to chase up).

Also I’m sorry if some people had a poor experience during covid. Most teachers I knew were working really hard, often with children of their own at home.

And if you want to moan about teachers striking, maybe show teachers a bit more respect generally by demonstrating to your children that their role is an important one? How can teachers tackle behaviour at school if the message they’re getting at home is that school isn’t really that important and oh dear you’re feeling a bit fed up today? Well never mind stay at home then.

I’ve just been thinking about it. Every single student I’ve worked with who has got into Oxbridge over the last few years had very good attendance. Every single one. You might not be fussed about academic performance, ok fine, but trust me your decision to enable your child to stay at home (and I have sympathy for those whose teenage children simply point blank refuse - that’s really hard and a whole other issue) will have an impact.

I see a lot of feeling that there are two groups in this discussion - "SEN children who can't cope with school" vs "truants".
Even ignoring how many of group 2 are actually group 1....I suspect the two groups are really "children who learn at home if they are not at school" and "children who don't learn at home if they are not at school".
The former won't necessarily get worse grades, as long as they are studying the same areas they will eventually be tested on - they won't fall behind and might even get a broader education. The second group are simply doing fewer hours towards the courses and so wouldn't get such good results in the exams testing those courses (even if they are learning other, non-tested, things in that time).