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.

@itsnotyouagain

Sounds like you where
Lucky with sen provided

Unfortunately all
Sencos/Schools are
Not born equal. Many many kids are being let down or not even believed in many cases. No wonder their parents are fed up and causing a row

Why not? They could speed it up that way.

Scans for brain differences in adhd and ASD are still in their infancy and so not reliable yet.

Things like fMRIs show differences but there’s a long way to go before they are used to diagnose. There’s also the issue that brain differences in one person may not affect them in the same way that brain differences affect another, and someone with minor differences can appear to be more severely affected. I’m reminded of a story about a nun who lived into her 100s who was still very sharp brained, but on death was found to have major brain signs of Alzheimer’s which was just not apparent when she was alive.

Humans are not all built the same, there’s no one size fits all that includes us all, there’s no one perfect treatment that suits us all. Problem is we live in a world that wants us all to be the same, which is a shame, because accepting the huge diversity and utilising the whole spectrum of strengths amongst all humans could lead to an incredible world for everyone.

There are some attitudes on here that are broadly sort of "school is fine, but people / kids / their parents need to toughen up about getting through it even if they don't love it"

I think there are loads of problems with this. I am definitely from a time when one gritted one's teeth and got on with things but it was different because -

you could leave at 16 and get a job. you didn't have this sense of it stretching out in front of you endlessly forever.

There were big playing fields and loads of outdoor time to decompress.

Work was delivered in books or by people talking in front of blackboards. You didn't have to stare at little screens. it was marked by humans who wrote comments in the margins. Diagrams and calculations were comprehensively expressed so you could see the whole thing at one time without scrolling. I think electronic media is exhausting for learning.

there was less pressure in general. you had to tough some things out but you didn't have these sustained long days where everything was tested and assessed. you could do your work to 80% and that was considered a good mark, so basically the 2/10 questions that were hard you didn't bother with, and guessed, and didn't get a "computer says no" response until you had done the bloody thing to the bitter end.
Unless you wanted to, which gave you a sense of satisfaction.

As I said earlier, the rules were followable. you could use the lavatories, because you had time at break, so you got to class on time. you had deadlines for homework written in a notebook so you didn't get confusion when some stupid app let you down and you could just get it in on time, in fact lack of tech in general put most things within your control - you just needed exercise books and a pen and then you put it in a pigeon hole before 9am on the right day and that way you were basically always in the clear. (although as I said earlier there was always the option to half arse it on low energy days.) You weren't allowed any kind of back chat at all so if you didn't want to get into trouble you shut the fuck up and no one tried to get you to "engage". (I realise that not all these things are as easy as I make them sound if you are ND, but if even if you are not, tech causes endless fuck ups with concentration and organisation. )

I don't think all this was great, I was pretty damaged by my school experience in some ways (ways other than the things I have talked about here) including a very high tolerance for boredom and very low expectations of work and life and myself. I am still working on that now - on showing up and thinking I matter - and I am 52.

Many people coped by thinking of "real life" as something outside school. Rich family life, their communities, their hobbies and that was ok because their parents didn't work 12 hours days (usually one or both worked part time or not at all) and didn't take it that seriously either. That attitude of "so what it's only school" or "so what it's only work" might not be considered de rigueur in todays's super achievery society, certainly on mumsnet, but not everyone is going to do everything brilliantly or belong perfectly in every environment and having a sense that your "real self" is appreciated elsewhere independently of all this is really important to feeling ok when things aren't going well.

If you were being bullied at work, and somehow it was being turned into a disciplinary process against you, but you couldn't work out how it was your fault or what you could have done differently; and it was not even conceivable you could get a job in a completely different kind of place and you just have to keep going there; and every night you came home to your partner tensely questioning you about it as if it is your fault and as if their approval of you is conditional on you working out this kafka-esque nightmare - well that's basically the position some of these kids seem to be in with their parents.

I think what I am saying is:
yeah in the olden days you could just tough it out, most of us did and it was possible;
it didn't leave us all in great shape.

One of mine gets the train to school and missed a lot of school due to train strikes and teaching union strikes. Couple that with not being able to get dentist appointments and orthodontics after school and a few genuine sick days, his absence doesn’t look great overall. The message from many sources is therefore still that missing school isn’t that important. If the Government wants kids in school and parents working more, make it easier for us.
Obviously if train strikes cause NHS delays further, none of it helps does it. But it is always us parents that get the blame. Or the new trend is blame the smart phone! It is like a drug, will be outlawed for under 16s soon….

I think Covid did sort of break the habit.
eldest dd is better now but her attendance has been in the 80s at times before.
ailments, anxiety, school is an unforgiving place if you’ve got a bad cold or feeling a bit ill, they never call parents and let them go home it seems. It was especially bad in post covid times when they were still posting lessons on line as she felt she could just do that. She is diligent and is predicted all 8s and 9s in her GCSEs so it doesn’t seem to have done her any harm academically. But j don’t want her to grow up into someone who is off work a lot.

I read that article yesterday. It was more the lack of basic skills and speech that shocked me. The fact that school have to teach parents how to play with their children is tragic, and I can tell you I'm hardly parent of the year by MN standards..I know schools have been dealing with these issues for a while and I largely blame austerity. However there is an epidemic of completely shit parenting and I blame screens and attitude shift for much of it. There is no shame anymore, and no willingness to take any responsibility for your own DC. I don't think all the 'be kind Hun you're doing your best' is healthy for children. It simply absolves some parents who need to be told they should do better. Sorry.

Also curriculum is incredibly boring and dry, doesn't help at secondary level. Again you have the government to thank for that.

People keep talking about the curriculum making school an unpleasant place to be but little attention is paid to the catastrophe that is school staffing and environment. Why would a kid who is anxious be keen to drag themselves into school where they will be faced with cover lessons where very little is learned and often behaviour can be terrible, pastoral staff is stripped to the bone and there is often high churn so they don't know the kids well, any TA support in lessons is basically gone, previous safe spaces like the library are now shut at lunchtime because the school can't afford a librarian, the school is filthy, freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer.

This.

Honestly talk to some parents. It's shocking what some come out with.

The richer parents can be as bad if not worse than the poor ones.

They have all the tech and toys so if their child wants attention they shove a screen in their face so they shut up and go away. This causes issues at school. The only way that child gets attention is by acting up. Parents aren't interested in parenting. They have more important things to do.

One kid in my son's class has come out with the following to another parent after she saw him hitting her son "my mum never tells me off. I can do anything I like". He's 8. He's also not lying. He's done allsorts in full view of mum and dad and they never say anything. It falls to other parents to intervene.

Then... Because these parents have money and huge amounts of entitlement they think they can just buy in someone to look after their child and expect them and school to do all the parenting. Then wonder why there's a problem when they just give their children every toy they demand but never have time for them.

It is obviously multifaceted.

Mine did claim that they learn more at home on Dr Frost/Seneca than with a random cover teacher and frankly, I do not blame them! There are days I am more efficient working from home than in the office too. Things have shifted. For the quite academic kids with parents at home who are actually supervising properly it may well be true.

RedToothBrush Yes you're right. I think the screens have made it completely easy to just not parent. Whilst austerity definitely magnifies lots of issues for many parents, some of the worst behaviour I've seen (downright rude, aggressive to their parents) has been from children with fairly privileged backgrounds. No suprise the parents are completely ineffectual and brush off completely unacceptable behaviour because they just CBA to deal with it.

There are good and bad parents at all levels of society and entitled behaviour at every level. Covid just seems to have intensified the entitlement and intolerance

We need to be careful with the rhethoric around screens. Educational apps can be amazing and enriching and the top schools around the world are using them to further push their students ahead. If used correctly, they are massively enriching, if used incorrectly they are terrible. Banning them completely will hold poorer children back.

I agree it has it's place, but the vast majority of children are not on tech playing educational games. Tech is a necessary part of life now, but the amount of time and content children are using is not a biologically normal part of childhood. Thus it should be used with extreme caution. Jon Haidt has this exactly right I believe and I think every parent should read his book. The data appears to back up that smart phone use has ruined the MH of young people.

I have read Jon Haidt and fully understand he is the new guru in education policy. That is exactly why I am saying that we should be careful. We have form for following a one line type of thinking in education policy.