To not understand the fixation on attendance?

[Gardenschmarden99]

Or at least to the level it currently is…

New education secretary and based on her speech to the association of school leaders it seems her focus is on attendance.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m an ex teacher with two primary age children who go to school whenever they aren’t unwell. Broadly I’m in favour of children going to school!

But I don’t think I’ve met many teachers who really think the current fixation is helpful. For those with deep seated problems, they would benefit from intervention. For those families that were unlucky enough to catch covid and a sickness bug in one school year the rather officious computer says no letters just erode the seriousness of actual attendance problems.

When children are unwell, they shouldn’t be in school even if it makes the attendance dip below 97%.

SEN children without support don’t have an attendance problem, they have a support problem (and I know this is because central government don’t fund local government well enough to pay for it but the kids can’t help that!)

I also think it would be such a crowd pleaser to allow 5 days authorised holidays at the discretion of the headteacher…. And yes, I’d also be in favour of my child’s teacher being able to go to a family wedding or see their child on sports day or (God forbid) have a day out with their spouse a few times a year.

My family live in a European country (not especially known for being ‘progressive’) where all this over focus on attendance is just not a thing. They outperform us in league tables for academic and mental health of children.

AIBU?

I also think it would be such a crowd pleaser to allow 5 days authorised holidays at the discretion of the headteacher

The problem there, OP, is that less responsible parents would take 5 days to mean 10, at least before they'd expect anything to be done about it, and that's before you get to the issue of Headteachers being bombarded with folk "explaining" why their case is exceptional

Of course genuinely sick kids shouldn't be in school, but I rather doubt it's these who are the focus, and the issue of irresponsible parents isn't an easy one to fix

What support?
Being called into meetings to improve attendance over and over again. Where the underlying issues are being pushed aside and ignored by the school.
Being sent on parenting courses which just add more stress and don't improve attendance at all because it isn't relevant when your child has health reasons for being absent.
In the last term alone we have averaged 1 hospital appointment a week. These take the whole day because location of hospital.
Not a damn thing we can do about medical appointments.

That definitely needs interrogating further. How many of the non-attenders have mental health difficulties and/or SEN? How many of the ones with SEN are not having their needs fully met? Guess what, there's a direct correlation between poor MH/unmet SEN and lack of attendance, also a direct correlation between poor MH/unmet SEN and low grades.

It might be unusually but neither of my children have ever had a day off sick in their entire school lives and are now teenagers. Neither caught Covid either. That is just pure luck, genetics and I think a particularly germy nursery! But I don’t think children should be punished for being sick. I get sick a lot and have forced myself into work when really I should not have and it isn’t fun.

I think your approach is fairly common now, and you are the type of parent the schools and government are trying to reach with their various measures and campaigns.

Of course we don't want genuinely ill children in school, but the attitude of 'school and qualifications are not important' is so sad, depressing and limiting that there is an obligation to address it.

So to everyone outraged that their ill child got a letter - this here is the problem.

We had the same. My dh died 3 years ago and it greatly affected us all as a family, I lost my dh and my kids lost their beloved stepdad, I took a few months of work but my dds were expected to attend school with very little support. As a result my dd2 attendance dropped as her mental health dived. Then my mum died, my dgs was born with kidney issues and then something else awful happened to our family. My dds are both really struggling. The school don’t give a fuck.

im done with it all

This. Loads of UK parents don't back up the school in terms of discipline (little Johnny couldn't possibly have done that/he was provoked!), homework (CBA reading/doing spellings/times tables with their child for 10 minutes a day) or getting them to school regularly.

It's all fine and well for MN parents to say they want more flexibility, but the reality is that it's usually not their DC who would suffer from that policy. It's those whose parents do a mediocre job to start with, and who need all the help they can get.

What irritates me is the sheer hypocrisy in all this. On the one hand we are told that one day out of school does irreparable harm, on the other hand we have children out of school due to an increased incidence of severe anxiety and mental health difficulties who are just left in limbo for months on end, despite legal duties on local authorities to provide alternative education. Frankly I would rather that government energies and finance were shifted to look at that second group rather than on obsessing about 100% attendance for all the others.

I think its really important. If kids aren't there they can't learn. Plus it's a safeguarding worry. We all knew kids who missed out because their parents struggled to get them in due to their own issues - the kid should have been in school, the parents needed help.

I'm really pleased my mum sent me to school with minor ailments or if I felt worried etc.. I found just getting on with things helped and I'm pretty resilient because of it.

Of course there will be circumstances where kids need time off due to illness including mental health. But if a kid is unhappy at school just taking time off sitting home watching tv won't solve it. It will be harder when they then fall behind or miss out on friendship stuff. In such cases a longer term solution is needed than just being relaxed about attendance.

I thinknthey mean more for families who don't have medical issues, more the school refusers

"What support?
Being called into meetings to improve attendance over and over again. Where the underlying issues are being pushed aside and ignored by the school."

We do try to help if parents share the reason.

We have provided transport, offered late start times, sourced an old washing machine, spoken to employers to change shifts and all sorts of other things to successfully improve attendance.

EBSA is a hard one to solve. The child identifies a source of anxiety but, once removed, another one takes its place. Eventually you've removed everything you can as a mainstream school, and added every reasonable adjustment. Some parents do have unreasonable expectations (not all).

I feel like it is similar to work places. Manager who has lost control and lacks management skills starts micromanaging employees.

It's true. Some schools do a lot to help, and go above and beyond. I think if families can't get the support needed from the wider system it must be tough though.

It’s the “computer says no” attitude that winds me up. Surely schools are aware of which families can’t be bothered, and the genuine cases.

My DD was hospitalised with Covid, and developed heart problems and Long Covid in sixth form. She was bed bound for weeks at a time. What we experienced from the school was nothing other than outright harassment. Despite me ringing every morning to report her absence (which is ridiculous in itself when she had a sick note, I still had to call every morning), I’d still get constant text messages and emails threatening us with social services. The stress of her illness plus the ongoing threats from school almost pushed me to a breakdown. Whenever I spoke to the school about it they’d just say “Yeah, just ignore the emails and texts. It’s just procedure for OFSTED”.

They were clueless about the stress it was causing and the implications that I was a disinterested parent who wasn’t making efforts to get my child to school.

Surely they can back off from the genuinely ill children and focus on the rest. No amount of threatening us would have made my daughter fit to attend school.

Our primary school allowed 5 days holiday a year in term time. They decreed that holidays are important and not everyone can afford to go away in school holidays. The school was ofsted outstanding and top in the county for sats results. It all changed about 6 years ago they could no longer get away with it

I agree.

During Covid the schools closed and we all had to adjust to the new world in which we were told that home learning was perfectly adequate. Of course for the majority of kids it wasn’t adequate (proper home educators aside), and it’s well established that most kids learned less during Covid.

However, once that “got to go to school” habit had been broken, some parents/pupils have struggled to get it back. We’ve all been desensitised to the idea of missing school. I have friends who always sent their kids to school unless they were actually ill. Now they keep them home if they “just don’t feel like going”, or if there’s a football match they want to watch, or it’s the last week of term etc. These are educated parents, who got themselves a nice stack of qualifications, have good jobs, lives not chaotic.

I think it’s this disengagement that schools are trying to reverse. Because ultimately the main losers are the kids.

My youngest DS was sent home for a week due to chicken pox (it was going round about 10% of the school was off). We where told we had to keep him off until it scabbed (even though in reality its contagious phase is before symptoms show). We did so and then he was put on a watch list for dangerous low attendance and told we where being monitored and could be reported.

My oldest was off for ONE day this year, due to food poisoning. Yes it was during exam period but he only missed one exam but he literally couldn't get off the toilet (shy of an inbetweeners moment what are we expected to do) and we got an amber attendance alert.

Those are the only time either of my kids missed school this year. It definitely takes the piss when a kid can't have 1 day of illness or being threatened with investigation and being reported when THEY sent him home and insisted he stay off (how is that our fault? if they send then home under their attendance rules it shouldn't count as absence because its clearly not truancy).

It never use to be this bad.

"It's true. Some schools do a lot to help, and go above and beyond. I think if families can't get the support needed from the wider system it must be tough though."

Yes, long waiting lists for CAMHS and other support services, and higher thresholds to actually access the support.

Schools bear the brunt because we are there every day, accessible and the face of education.

Most schools don't hate children and families, or want to annoy them.

But there's only so much we can achieve whilst still meeting the needs of the other children, budget etc

The focus is on attendance because that makes it the parents and children's problem. If they can point fingers they don't have to make schools a place that kids want to or can be.

The problem isn’t the children with medical or mental health conditions. Thanks to covid we can easily provide work online if they are able to do some. Those with interested parents will maybe do some school work at home and generally not fall too far behind. Attendance letters are automated but that doesn’t mean the actual school doesn’t understand.

The problem is the children who just aren’t attending for no great reason and their parents who see no problem with that. We can post work but that doesn’t mean they will look at it. The very fact they are off without good reason generally means the parents don’t see education as important.

I disagree with the person saying it doesn’t matter. Schools are full of children who can’t even get an interview at Macdonalds because they don’t have basic English and Maths qualifications. And who can’t get into college or an apprenticeship because they lack some basic qualifications. Since they now need to be either in Education or employment until 18 (at least in. Scotland) that means the senior years are littered with kids who are there because they can’t just leave at 16.

The impact on basic literacy and numeracy skills of poor attendance in primary is huge. Pupils arriving to secondary with a reading age of 7 is sadly pretty common now. This makes it very difficult for them to even access secondary education. The support just isn’t there for these children who are struggling but don’t have any specific need other than to turn up more.
It’s a downward spiral. The parents don’t see that attendance is important. The kids behave badly as they don’t understand the lessons and the parents defend the kids and allow them to stay off even more.
Schools barely have the staff and funding to support those with genuine SEN let alone those who attend only 60% of the time because it’s easier to let them stay home than to make them go to school.

So many people get defensive about attendance- but it’s not your kids we are worried about. We know of health issues or family issues and try to support as much as we can. Schools don’t send out the shitty letters to be mean. It’s an automated process when a child reaches a trigger point.
We’re worried about the growing number of kids who just can’t be bothered with the parents who just don’t care.

Yes there’s access to uni etc you can return to later in life but it’s all so much more difficult when you’re 25 and still struggling with literacy.

Attendance is a blunt instrument.

There is a vast difference between parents who don’t ensure their children attend school and those for whom the system has failed, because there is little or no support for their needs, whether emotional or medical.

Unfortunately, the system doesn’t allow for discriminating between the two.

It also seems to be the case that, since Covid, school is seen as less of a priority.

This is so sad. Surely as parents we want to open doors for our kids, not close them before they’ve reached adulthood. Going through school and getting GCSEs (+ or - A levels) gives them options. They can continue their education, or go into jobs or apprenticeships that require less formal academic qualifications. The choice is theirs. It is such a shame to remove that choice from them when they’re still too young to make the decision themselves.

As a previous poster said, I think it’s attitudes like this that schools are targeting, and sadly kids who are genuinely unwell are getting caught in the crossfire.

"It’s the “computer says no” attitude that winds me up. Surely schools are aware of which families can’t be bothered, and the genuine cases. "

Surely you can see how difficult it would be for schools and staff to judge a family as genuine or not.

Imagine once word got out - anyone being contacted would know they'd been judged as a feckless malingerer and respond accordingly.

We treat everyone the same and hope parents are sensible enough to understand why I guess.

For those saying it’s not the parents of genuinely ill dc that are the focus we were treated like absolute liars by our previous school - told to send a picture of the antibiotic bottle to prove one dc had an infection, told to bring dc into school when they had a high fever as they wanted to take it themselves to double check, another occasion telling me I had to take Ds in so they could assess if he was too ill for school - we refused this . We then had to provide drs letters which meaning dc to the gp for things we would not usually visit for just to get a letter. Wasting gp time because if we didn’t we were getting threatened.

in one week you can miss a whole unit of maths.

Therein lies some of the issue. The curriculum is overloaded.

I recall doing the same stuff a number of times at school back in the 70s, to drive it home. Plus we didn't do things like 3D shapes and volume until we were a lot older. The primary years were ramming home the basics, rinse and repeat. We maybe learnt a narrower range, but we knew it.

Nowadays they do so much at a younger age, but do it for a week and move on to the next thing with half the class still being clueless.

The problem with that is that a lot of kids end up thinking they are crap at stuff because they are learning stuff too soon, before the scaffolding of the basics is in place.

It shouldn't be like that.