Up to 100,000 children missing from school rolls

[TheDailyCarbunkle]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-60054253

If anyone has any doubt about the risk created by lockdowns, doubt no more. Many of those children will be absolutely fine, well cared for, educated at home. But many many of them will not - without regular attendance at school and someone outside their family monitoring them daily, they will have just fallen through the cracks. Who knows what the final fallout of this will be?

My friend is a social worker and has said lockdown has been and will continue to be catastrophic for children. It's awful.

This is really concerning. Safeguarding issues have never been more prevalent.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

I think the figure not only refers to pupils who didn’t return, but also Covid related absences - illness, isolating (correct me if I’m wrong).

But do you blame lockdowns for that or Covid itself? Lockdowns were used across Europe - until a way was found to control infection rates. Had infection rates not been brought under control, or a solution found - surely there would have been more deaths, more disruption for pupils, and that figure would have been much higher?

TheDailyCarbunkle
People who say 'this was a problem pre-covid' are right but I'm struggling to understand the point they're making? Is it that, because it was a problem pre-covid the fact that lockdowns made it worse is a non-issue? Or what?

Part of the point posters are making is that schools, social service etc. have been making this point for years and only now is it coming to the fore of politics.
Not to argue for better services but to blame schools etc. for not doing enough.

I think previous posters have mentioned that the framing of the question isn’t really v good.

Kids are 4 by the time they go to school. That’s an awful lot of time for neglect and abuse to happen. IF the question is neglect and abuse - then there needs to be gateway checks after the 6week baby check that theGPs do.

IF the question is more about making sure that kids get an appropriate education, then you need to have a look and define what appropriate means - in this case both Kids at school and out of school should be asked. Because schools may not always be able to provide appropriate education for every child (eg MH issues, SEN). Not all kid are the same - so expectations for the type of education they should receive is not the same either.

[quote Emergency73]@TheDailyCarbunkle

I think the figure not only refers to pupils who didn’t return, but also Covid related absences - illness, isolating (correct me if I’m wrong).

But do you blame lockdowns for that or Covid itself? Lockdowns were used across Europe - until a way was found to control infection rates. Had infection rates not been brought under control, or a solution found - surely there would have been more deaths, more disruption for pupils, and that figure would have been much higher?[/quote]
Sweden never once closed school for under 16s. Maybe we should compare to them?

If comparing with Sweden, you would also need to compare Covid levels at all points in the pandemic, all mitigation measures in schools, funding and availability of all services for children and famiilies, arrangements and laws around home education , provision for SEN children and those facing mental health challenges, levels of poverty etc. It is a system-wide issue so you would have to make a comparison at a system-wide level, starting with how many children were not registered in school before the pandemic.
challenges, etc. It'a a system

@cantkeepawayforever

If comparing with Sweden, you would also need to compare Covid levels at all points in the pandemic, all mitigation measures in schools, funding and availability of all services for children and famiilies, arrangements and laws around home education , provision for SEN children and those facing mental health challenges, levels of poverty etc. It is a system-wide issue so you would have to make a comparison at a system-wide level, starting with how many children were not registered in school before the pandemic. challenges, etc. It'a a system

I agree. But if the argument is that keeping schools open would have caused more damage and disruption then it makes sense to compare to a place that did keep schools open. Other factors can be controlled for.

To my mind, making any sort of argument that keeping schools closed created a net benefit, for children or the wider community, makes absolutely no sense. Keeping children at home without friends, engagement, stimulation, education might be justifiable very short term in extreme circumstances. But UK children were kept at home for months. Maybe the lack of children on the rolls is not the best way to measure the destruction that wreaks. It's interesting though how people are fixating on that rather than the undeniable fact that children have paid an absolutely massive price in this whole mess.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

They’ve been highly controversial though haven’t they? If the majority of Europe, including the UK, had adopted that strategy, would we have been able to control Covid, control infection rates, had a healthy population functioning and able to support children? And had hospitals that were able to serve the population effectively?

It’s impossible to know. Sadly we are here now, we’ve avoided any further lockdowns - and I think the government needs to give immense support to schools and social services - which they probably won’t.

@cantkeepawayforever

(You may say that a family isolating is only delaying the inevitable. However, delaying is obviously useful in terms of improvement in treatment, increasing number of people with immunity in the community preventing massive spikes, rollout of vaccine to all age groups etc.

When this virus really does reach endemicity (as opposed to when the Government declares that it is 'endemic') yes, there will be local outbreaks every now and again - but there should never again be a point where 1 in 10 to 1 in 30 of people are infected throughout the country for quite long periods of time, and where the NHS is under such tremendous pressure.

It's like chicken pox of norovirus - yes, a child might catch one or the other, BUT there will tend to be a short-lived flurry of cases in an area and then none at all for many months, so the probability of catching it on any given day is very small. At the moment, in schools, this is not the case for coronavirus.)

I'm not trying to argue with you on this one, I just want to say that it makes absolutely no sense to me.

Reducing covid to zero is bonkers and impossible but at least it makes coherent logical sense - if there's no covid, no one can get covid.

Reducing the overall burden of covid to reduce the burden on healthcare also makes sense - fewer people sick at any one time means less demand for treatment. Logical.

Sending some children to school but not others on the basis that the risk is lower - absolute fucking nonsense. Probability means absolutely nothing when you're talking about actual people in a real situation. If the level of covid isn't zero then the level of risk isn't zero. So by sending some children and not others to school you're essentially saying it's ok to expose some children to that risk, but not others. Of course that makes no actual sense - those children weren't in any way expendable. Nor were they at any real risk - everyone knew that, otherwise they would never even have considered letting it happen. It was considered that for some children, the need to go to school was greater than the need to protected from covid. An actual judgement on the needs of some children was made - everyone else was just subject to a blanket denial of education, not because covid was any real risk to children but because it was considered necessary for children to sacrifice a huge chunk of their childhood and education 'for the greater good.'

It is hard to fathom.

I am not quite sure why the emphasis is on 'school closure', if what you really mean is 'the pandemic'.

Yes, the closure or restrictions of services for children due to the pandemic - often for much, much longer than schools were closed - has been bad for children and families. I don't think anybody would dispute that.

Would having schools open, in isolation, have solved that? No. We know that because before, during and after the school closures, the lack of capacity for all services to do anything meaningful about the many, many issues identified and flagged up by schools has meant that the harms to children have not been mitigated or prevented.

Schools were closed for 1.5 terms out of 6 - at maximum. Locally, a child referred for CAMHS support before the pandemic would still have 6 more months on the waiting list. No SaLT have worked face to face for 6 terms. ed Psych visits only restated after 15 months. SS referrals are not auctioned because they are completely overwhelmed. Non e of those issues are school closure related - schools are open but the other services were not, and are still not, able to cope with the needs schools identified even before the pandemic

I think it's possible to completely recognise that children (and young people) have paid an absolutely massive price in this whole mess, yet not somehow position school closures as they were (ie never completely closed) as solely or even mainly responsible for this cost.

Undoubtedly, the situation in schools could have been managed hugely better by the government throughout. The technology and access to Broadband that they promised could have been delivered. Schools could have been supplied with air filtration units. School staff could have been prioritised for the vaccine. Educationalists could have been consulted about decisions made. Individual schools/LAs could have been given more autonomy to make decisions about blended learning etc. They could have given some sort of guidance about what the hell schools were supposed to do when told to close at a few days notice and abandon the curriculum. Mandatory mask wearing for secondary at least could have been introduced early and kept, not stopped just as cases were rising.

The list goes on.

Similarly, local authorities could have been adequately funded for the preceeding 10 years meaning that fewer children with SEN would have been so appallingly let down and fewer children who were persistently absent were able to go 'off radar'.

It was a pandemic. Nearly the whole global population was mandated to 'stay at home' for months (with various explanation of what that meant in practice). The fact that so many children aren't safe at home, or don't even have somewhere to really call home are failings at a far higher level than temporary, partial closures of schools tbh.

I'll try to explain the lower risk of fewer people again, if you really don't understand.

Normally, a class is well over 30. Distance between seated pupils is around 75 cm maximum, and every child physically touches their neighbour. Each child has over 30 close contacts, simply by virtue of being in the same ckass, even if they have no other meetings in corridors or toilets. Where infection rates are at 1 in 30 or more, each child has one case in their group at any time.

In lockdown, class sizes were reduced to 15. Every child had desks to themselves. They didn 't touch anyone, and distances of at least 1.5 metres could be maintained. When cases were 1 in 30, chances of having a case in the class were halved, and chances of transmission were significantly reduced through distancing.

That's basic epidemiology - the 'space' part ...

That is before we consider all the other changes - zones, eating outside, far more lessons outside, additional cleaning - that were also in force at that time.

It was a pandemic. Nearly the whole global population was mandated to 'stay at home' for months (with various explanation of what that meant in practice). The fact that so many children aren't safe at home, or don't even have somewhere to really call home are failings at a far higher level than temporary, partial closures of schools tbh

I agree with this completely.

If you would prefer a non-school analogy - think of two train joirneys.

The first is a trip in a country train between 2 stations. Nobody gets on, nobody gets off, a Each person sits in their own space, and it is the same group of people on this journey every day. there is no more than 1 person per group of seats. The windows are open.

The second is a London tube train at a busy time, travelling the same distance but with multiple stops. There is constant movement of people in and out and every seat is taken by people squeezed up against one another. There is little fresh air.

If the Covid rate is the same in each community (ie there is the sane chance of any individual carrying the infection), in which scenario is a traveller taking that journey every day more likely to be infected?

@cantkeepawayforever

Brilliant explanation

@cantkeepawayforever

I am not quite sure why the emphasis is on 'school closure', if what you really mean is 'the pandemic'.

Sadly referrals to children's social work drop away during the school holidays because many children have no one to tell, and no one to see bruises or signs of neglect. For many children school is their safe place, with heating, warm food and someone who cares. DH used to interview children for child protection, process very often triggered when a child arrives at school and says "Daddy hit me yesterday" or similar.

Namechange - I know. As a teacher, of course I know. However, what we need is both schools and social services to be fully open and fully resourced. During lockdown, we referred multiple children to ss, but were always met with ‘we are wfh/ we aren’t allowed to visit children/ we don’t have the capacity’. The harm to children is caused - or rather the existing desperate situation was exacerbated- by the lockdown closures if ALL child and family support services, many of whom were effectively closed fir normal service for MUCH longer than schools were, and without even the level of service for known vulnerable/ sen children that schools remained open for.

(It is probably worth noting that we actually made MORE, rather than less, SS referrals during lockdown than we would normally - so far from school closures meaning we were unaware of or ignored needs, we were actually more alert to them than ever. There was extraordinarily little response from other services, however - and that continues to be the case from all services working with children because they have no capacity after many years of under resourcing.

That's shocking, as I understand it children's ss never stopped here, but had to work differently. In some areas there was excellent joint working between education and social work.

The thing is, the threshold for ss being able to respond is SO high, due to their lack of capacity, that a lot of referrals that would once (say 5 -10 years ago) prompted immediate face to face involvement with families now don’t meet the criteria for any involvement at all. It’s a case of the pandemic making existing problems worse and more visible, exactly as for children with Sen, absence of special school places, safeguarding for he families etc etc.

I'm going to try drawing parallels with a historical event of large scale that affected children. And a somewhat clunky analogy.

The mass evacuation programme in WWII. Whilst it was undoubtedly a good idea for many, some suffered as a result - HOWEVER, what it did achieve was to show people the sheer scale of deprivation, neglect, malnutrition and vulnerability that thousands of those evacuees had experienced prior to being moved.

It hadn't been a secret as such, but there had been no real measure of it, no real will to do anything about it and for those who were living outside major cities, there was a real will to want to address those problems once they could see them with their own eyes.

As a result, although I don't think that anybody would ever claim that War is a good thing, the fact that it happened and evacuations were necessary enabled new information, new discussions, a will to do something as it couldn't be ignored and, combined with the advantages of rationing ensuring that by the end of the 1940s, children were on the whole healthier than their peers a decade earlier.

Actually looking for and finding a problem is not the same as causing it. If I find the fridge is leaking, it's not my fault that it's leaking for noticing that there is water on the floor - and it's not my fault it's leaking for then pulling out the thing from under the counter, possibly tearing a bit of the flooring, sweeping out cobwebs and looking to see there's something in the back of the drip tray that has caused it to overflow and is also soaking into the kickboard of the cupboard next to it so that it is rotting;

• but I have suspected there is an issue, I've investigated, I've caused some disruption and possible unhappiness (with DP now being chased across the room by a rather large spider, so both DP and the spider are both rather wishing I'd left well alone) and as a result of actually looking rather than largely ignoring the small amount of water at the front of the fridge, I've identified the scale of the problem, some unknown additional consequences of that issue having been left and I can then take steps to do something to resolve both that problem and some of the consequences of that leak (needing a new kickboard, for example).

We have been saying for years that there's a puddle of water at the front of the fridge, but it's been ignored because it would be too disruptive, the spiders won't want to be disturbed, nobody likes spiders coming out into the kitchen and we probably won't like what we find if we pull the fridge out and look, as it'll cost more and once we'll know that the actual scale of the problem, it could result in expensive trips and the inconvenience of going to B&Q to try to source replacement kickboards - ignoring the fact that if it continues to be ignored, that water could lead to an electrical shock, slips and injuries and in time, the need to replace the entire floor unit or even the floor with all the expense and disruption that entails.

In this analogy, Covid could be represented by another event - say, the washing machine breaking down. It's necessary to pull that out and have a look behind it in case there's water damage behind it or the water is getting close to a power outlet. That's then led us to look behind the fridge we were told to ignore and find out there was already a long term problem that needed to be brought into the clear light of day so it and its consequences can be dealt with.

Some of the things we'll find aren't actually problems. They might have been, but now we've looked properly, actually, it's OK - there isn't a mouse nest behind there (finding that some children aren't actually missing, they're safely home educated, in the private sector or in other schools). Some are problems but they can be dealt with quickly - sweeping up crumbs down the side where the toaster sits so as not to attract bugs (so they're children who were awaiting a school place and now the local authority has ordered a school to take them immediately). And some of the things will be big problems that have to be dealt with - the children who were abused or neglected or did not receive a suitable school place despite the best efforts of their parents. But in all, nobody knows for sure what's going on until there is a compelling reason to insist that we pull the appliances out and actually look at what's going on behind the shiny white facade.

Covid was the compelling reason. And now there are no more excuses, we've got to look. Now we know they're 'missing', we've got to find the children. We've got to find why and how they've dropped off the radar. Sometimes it will all be fine, sometimes it won't. But that's not all the fault of Covid. It's the fault of the lack of will on the part of government to be looking in the first place.

Neverdrop - I read that and nodded along. As previously said, the 100,000 figure of children missing from school rolls appears in documents in 2003, and may have appeared earlier. If Covid provides the impetus to sort this properly- which is going to require a system-wide investigation and reform, including additional funding and recruitment- then that will be a good thing to have come from something terrible.

@cantkeepawayforever
@NeverDropYourMooncup

I think your posts are some of the best I’ve ever read on Mumsnet - to the point that I welled up a bit.

I wholeheartedly agree.

It was a pandemic. Nearly the whole global population was mandated to 'stay at home' for months(with various explanation of what that meant in practice)

This is just not true at all, even with your caveat. There would've been a great many more deaths if it were. Being able to implement any kind of lockdown for that length of time is the preserve of societies with the resources to do it. What you mean is much of the richer world did it. It's an extremely important distinction.