21% of pupils are persistently absent! National average is double post COVID

[FusionChefGeoff]

Just read this on the BBC

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1ddegp8zvo

It's a stark statistic that nearly a quarter of kids are basically not getting an education. A quarter of our society is being failed before they even reached adulthood.

The article does explore various different reasons that contribute or explain the massive number but I'm shocked at how high it is and what a massive challenge it is to sort it out. I'm definitely going to be listening hard to the politicians take on this issue or is everyone who matters just ignoring it?

I'd break it down into the following categories and I think points 2 and 3 demonstrate why this is such a major problem as they are a 'dammned if you do, damned if you don't' combination.

• genuine, extreme medical mental health issues which you'd imagine should normally be quite a small number but has been drastically increased by the collapse in our CAHMS service
• school induced medical health issues due to draconian rules / behaviours management systems
• school induced mental health issues due to the lack of the above and disruptive behaviour / breakdown of trust / general chaos
• home induced mental health issues due to family situation eg mental health issues in parents / bereavements / other trauma
• inherited lack of belief / value in education so parents don't care, kids don't care, don't bother going to school basically neglectful parents
• manipulative kids using 'mental health' as a way to get out of doing something they don't want to do combined with permissive / poor parenting which allows this behaviour

The biggest thing we have to tackle is why there's such a huge increase in ADHD and autism diagnoses (assuming you can access any kind of assessment of course)....

is it just that we talk more about it?

Is it early access / excessive use of devices that wires our kids all wrong to cope with the world?
Is it a rise in well intentioned but misunderstood 'gentle parenting' ie people doing it wrong and ending up with very permissive / neglectful parenting that again, wires their brains all wrong and removes all resilience?

We can't just keep looking at throwing money and resources the very acute symptoms ie the school refusers without putting the same effort into understanding and FIXING the problems.

I just can't accept a world where a quarter of kids are at such an enormous disadvantage in life before they even leave school it's too sad.

I disagree about adhd being anxiety, if anything asd behaviours can be triggered by anxiety.

Adhd children can be very different from baby/toddler stage.

So yes while non adhd kids can do stuff. My eldest,
Tried to lock us out the house,
Hid keys in the garden
Ate something had to go to a&e
Put stuff up nose repeatedly
Poop smeared
Would try to touch everything in shops
Scratched, hit and bit (mainly parents)
Never stopped anything without physical removal, saying no did nothing.

Child copy others bad behaviour, having a lot of badly behaved children (for whatever reason) will affect the rest of the class.

Moving much faster to exclusion would benefit everyone.
Even kids 'at school' arent necessarily in class.
Behaviour at secondary is so bad some are going to the behaviour unit daily...

For my asd child being forced to do teamwork is stressful and not working. Its something i never really did much at school. Though loads of pointless crap team projects at uni. Learning to work together is a skill but at dc secondary it is certainly not being taught.

I wouldnt fine for ks1. But have progressively larger fines for older year groups. As you can see from one or 2 posters they have no motivation to get dc to school.
Theres only 3 secondary years till they can drop some subjects.
Some of dc maths class only got 28% on a relatively simple maths paper (from what they have covered). They are in sets.

However blatantly attendance doesnt give you the achievements. I attended uni except once i had d&v and got a 2:2. Some clearly are clever enough not to need to attend school.

It must be hard to keep making a child attend school if they are clearly going to fail everything or cant read or write or do sport.

This, definitely.

My child started reception and has caught everything going - we've already had an attendance meeting but I don't think they'd want us sending a child in who's been vomiting/has chickenpox/running a fever. The bloody attendance officer even had the cheek to say he'd 'missed a lot of Mondays and Friday's', but this was from him being out a couple of full weeks at a time so...yeah?

Really has put my back up and soured my perception of the school and we are very motivated for our kids to do well at school.

I'll give an example. DD3, started with anxiety in year 9. Some ASD and OCD symptoms but not too disruptive of her education. Attendance 100%. Spiralled in March 2023. Attendance fell to 80%. ASD and OCD referrals put in. Took until June 2023 to get anyone to take it seriously. Support put in place but hampered by the behaviour of another pupil. Trust lost. CAMHS referral initially rejected, then accepted.

Spiralled further in September 2023 - pressure of mocks plus worsening OCD. Out of school since November, EHCP application. EHCP agreed April 2024, placement at specialist provision agreed June 2024. Early Help CAMHS appointment last week - will be put on treatment list for OCD, but will be a year+.

So she has missed, effectively, a year of school. She is needing therapy to get her to the point that she can trust another education setting.

She was on target for top grades and was a model pupil.

@lavenderlou
Totally agree

I think this is it, as a culture we are fairly anti education, anti aspiration, anti intelligence, it only needed something like this to really put the boot into school attendance.

I am only British by naturalisation but don't believe so. I believe instead that the education system is broken for anyone who does not conform or align to the average the curriculum is built upon, from anxiety to any kind of S(E)N.

You can't punish for what you caused.

I love your honestly. Really insightful and sensible post, thank you.

The solution is investment, which is unlikely to happen any time soon - Sure Start, more TAs, better mental health services etc.

Because when you pay for something you value it more. If state parents had to pay the 7K per year it costs the government them I'm damned sure more would ensure their DC attended!
At DDs private school they don't query or negatively monitor absence but the flip side is that the current Yr 7 attendance is 97% for the whole year group

Was it referencing Jonathan Haights book The Anxious Generation? I have it but haven't read it yet.

Yes rbt behaviour in scouts so age 10+ is pretty bad here. Tbf its mostly the boys. But the giros can be similar. It maybe that th kids are into not sitting still etc. but walking past them to the pickup point some wer e swearing talking to each other. They certainly dont stand still nicely waiting for activities to start. They are off, running off.
i was waiting for mine back in a museum and the ones waiting for their activity got told off by the gift shop person within 5-10mins. This behavior i think started when the boys started hanging out at the park unsupervised. Frankly the brownies etc behaviour isnt great either but its more disorganised, chatting.
Last week the cubs were having great fun - but they were meant to be on only the playground tarmac on specific area, fhere wdre zooming about the grass all over and in an area they were told not to go on.

im not sure these kids are like this at school. At primary anyway. Secondary seems feral to me!

Agree with this.

I would say a lot of the kids I work with who hate school, complain about the boring and narrow curriculum and over testing. There seems to be no joy in discovering new learning or getting good at something, just always racing to move on to the next thing, not covering anything properly, the marking is always ‘could be better IF’ and continual assessments.

It wasn't like this when I attended Primary school, 40+ years ago. In Secondary school there wasn't really any pressure until you hit the O'level years and even then it wasn't until what is now year 11 that it really kicked in.

I was tested a lot, but it was the year after me that were tested constantly (those born 1984). It’s never gone back.

Seriously no. Wrong way round. ADHD hear negativity aimed at them 20% plus more than NT kids. With some of them makes them anxious.
Some schools are so stupidly strict that nervous kids too end up in fear of school

@Hairyfairy01 I guess some of the ones with high absence share a similar view. Your DD may have no interest in music per se but the skills it teaches are useful regardless. The odds of her making it in swimming / gym are slim but maybe she'll want to coach it? But her long term earnings would probably be better elsewhere.

I would say a lot of the kids I work with who hate school, complain about the boring and narrow curriculum and over testing. There seems to be no joy in discovering new learning or getting good at something, just always racing to move on to the next thing, not covering anything properly, the marking is always ‘could be better IF’ and continual assessments.

My youngest son has complained of this. No sooner would he be getting engrossed in a subject than it’s finished. There’s no room for mistakes. DS didn’t learn well in a class environment, he’d zone out and struggle to retain information, so he was in trouble.
Humans don’t do well in these circumstances.
Making mistakes is the best way to learn, yet children in school are punished if they make too many of them. How on earth can any child discover a love of learning when school is like this?

My gut instinct is that the bureaucratic need for ticked boxes and evidence of progress should go. Trust teachers. Stop testing small children and teaching them crap they don’t need to know (fronted adverbials and other such shit).

When you look at some big successful companies and how they work - they really understand humans and how they work, then you look at schools right now and they haven’t a clue. How have we got here?
At the same time as knowing it’s not working people defend it to the death - it hasn’t harmed their children (I’m alright Jack), there’s no alternative - putting so much energy into arguing for a shitty system that lets a large minority down, then often arguing against parents taking matters into their own hands or trying to fight for better support for their child because working with the school very often doesn’t get you anywhere.

Where’s our fight? Where’s our drive to make things better? It’s like we’ve all been drummed down so much we’ve lost sight of how much better it could be for everyone.

No, it doesn't cause ADHD. It's something a person is born with and shows up in brain scans as a person with ADHD will have a different functioning brain to someone neurotypical.

ADHD causes anxiety, not the other way around.

Do they do a scan for diagnosis?

I was always v adamant that my kids needed to be in school all the time, and I do still follow that and am lucky they are infrequently ill. Where I have shifted my attitude, and I expect others may have as well, is post Covid I feel ‘justified’/not bothered about taking them out of school for a few days at the end of term for holiday. I wouldn’t have done this previously, but now feel more relaxed about them missing a few days when they missed so much over Covid. We are talking max 3 days a year though, but my attitude has changed on this and I expect others might feel the same to a greater degree.

I do think a lot comes down to parental attitude, and I think that is borne out if private schools are not experiencing same levels of non attendance.

No experience of ND here so won’t comment on that, other than to say the prevalence seems much higher these days and presumably is also having an impact.

No

@stayathomer would you
mind giving me more details about the link between hayfever and dental issues- my DS is suffering terribly with hayfever and it’s affecting attendance, plus orthodontist appointments which are only in school hours and our previously great attendance is taking a hit.

Twilightstarbright

So he gets horrendous nasal issues a lot of the year, colds and the like, then in the summer eyes watering and really really nasal, sometimes with the sore ears but they were saying all the passageways kind of link up. They’ve checked him twice ti make sure it’s not the ears and gromits aren’t needed and said people don’t usually remember that teeth have a huge link to ears and nasal issues. Given that he needs braces, they think it’s all linked

@RawOvaltine

You make some great point here

Re work. I work for a really inclusive company
It attracts ND people, it's pretty geeky think arts film and fantasy but NTs love it too

The ND people are really well supported and stay years and years. They are so well supported that it's a customer facing role and they still don't burn out.

If only every company and school could
Do this Think of what we could achieve.

Autistic and adhd people can often be some of the most intelligent individuals amongst us. What could
Be achieved if we as
Society could provide school and work that doesn't end up in burn out.

It's infuriating and wrong.

Twilightstarbright

Hops he gets sorted, it’s horrible seeing them like that x