1 in 5 children missing school

[ladykale]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66701748.amp

I don't understand these stats in the U.K. a proportion of children suffer from mental health and SEN issues which are not well supported in school, but that can't be 1 in 5!

Mental health/SEN aside, interested to hear from mums on here - do you let you kids not go to school if they don't feel like it or push back a lot?

How come school attendance rates are much higher in other European countries and very high in developed Asian countries - are their children not subject to similar mental health challenges?

Are these children at home or on the streets while they don't attend school?

DD year 11 can’t wait to finish school, she’s had a torrid time at secondary, bullied out of one school, school she’s at is not great but she’s made some lovely friends, was going great until she started getting picked on again (some kid from her old school turned up at this one and reignited the bullying she previously suffered) this reinstated her low self esteem and anxiety which we’d worked so hard to build back up. However she’s a different girl at her Sat job, already has apprenticeship lined up to go to, so overly not that worried about attendance, I’m more concerned in keeping her mental health intact until she finishes, sat in a loo cubicle too intimidated to go to class for whole lessons isn’t doing her any good, getting called weird by boys as she has no interest in them, June cannot come quick enough and will be the end of what I can only describe as a shit show.

Thank you so much.

Shes much improved, just been diagnosed ex with ADHD as well as ASd. Going to enter alternative provision at a farm ( she loves animals) until September, then should be going to HF ASd school for A levels.

The fight for the EHCP was the fight of my life. But they came through with everything in the end🙏

How nice for those with mh difficulties to not be supported.

l’m not sure why it’s not a priority. Maybe a few suicides would push it up?

Gosh yes I suppose it could be worse...

My point is that we were there too and there was a system that automatically came to our aid. We fought and fought for our child, but so did the school and so did the doctors. When she needed a therapist, she got a therapist. When she needed testing, she got testing. She wasn’t put on a waiting list and told that maybe she might get some CBT at some point if she got lucky. Her school didn’t put their head in the sand and say they didn’t have funding for yet another special needs student. Everyone saw a child in crisis and jumped into action before it got really, really bad which is how it is supposed to work.

im sorry if my choice of language was offensive. I get the impression it is a bit of a boiling frog situation and it’s hard to see just how badly you are being treated. I wasn’t trying to criticize parents who are just trying to navigate a ridiculous system.

Sorry! Yes it seems a very passive situation, because everything is stuck.

Yet gp, pyschiatrist, Ed pysch were all saying they’ve been overwhelmed with with kids with mh provlems. Beyond overwhelmed,

My 8 year old has not attended now for 4 months due to unmet Sen needs. I am fighting every day, constant emails calls etc, people always in my house which I struggle with. I will do anything to get him a school place where he can manage, currently the EHCP draft is with the head of service for our council to decide if he can get the place that has been offered. I have been fighting for 2 years for this. But people only see him at home with me, I have been called lazy and it has been suggested that I just drag him into school and let him get on with it. What damage will that do to a child already in crisis! He needs therapy, medication and assessments but despite daily fighting it seems we get nowhere fast! He has started self harming, refuses to sleep in his own bed or leave my side due to high anxiety. Merge that with autism and adhd and he just can't cope. But let's blame the parents. School have been amazing, but they can't manage anymore so we are in this position.

Schools are not always very nice places to be but parents are blamed if the child won’t or can’t go to school. Teachers are leaving in their droves… they clearly don’t want to be there but our kids are meant to be immune to this and just crack on with surviving rather than thriving in a system that seems to what to churn out robots who can regurgitate content rather than young people who love learning.

Also our kids are in school in the UK for more days in the year than many other countries. We lived overseas for a while and enjoyed the 3 month long summer holidays as well as days off for parent teacher conferences among other things. Parents were trusted to make decisions for their kids even if that included a duvet day every now and then. Now we’re back and my DD is not showing signs of being behind and yet she’s spent significantly less time in school over the previous few years than her peers here.

COVID showed me just how much of the school day is spent not really doing meaningful learning. But we’re still expected to believe that every hour they miss not being in school will put them at a huge disadvantage . I’m not sure that’s true. Certainly not in all cases.

Referral and diagnosis via nhs is crazy.
Already a year now on the asd side and only a you are now on a 'waiting list' but its prioritised by need
The adhd i have heard back and completed forms but nothing since oct

Dc is definitely suicidal/depressed.

But agree re the bullying.
The kids general behaviour has completely changed in y6. The boys and in y7 the girls.
Weve had
Shoes kicked off and tripped up by maybe y5 boys 6ft
Water squirted at dd -- in class (boys)
Told to FO by random other kids (boys)
Girl trying to get dd in trouble on class
Girl hiding in art cupboard
Kids moved to other classes

Y6 residential
Eating all their own snacks then hunting for other kids and eating them (3 diff kids)

In activities
Boy says to another and group you are the most hated boy in school
Throwing mallet in the air several times
Running about between teams

The problem is like a riot bad behaviour spreads.

The lack of supervision is ruining it for the meek kods and the boisterous kids as they all end up woth no friends.

What child is going to choose to go in and be told to FO. Squirted. Told they are weird.

In a nutshell, spot on.

Some of them are safer at home. I don't know what kind of state DD will be in when she gets to leave in 3.5 years time. Shoved into the only available sink school in a crime ridden estate, pushed around and sworn at daily in the corridors by the angry dysfunctional kids, has now started school refusing, due to anxiety after a prime y8 specimen pulled a machete out of his bag at a crowded bus stop right outside the gates. Oh and two from y11 taking drugs in the toilets and rushed to hospital. Kids who saw the ambulance were told somebody had fallen downstairs. All the school can do is phone up and bang on about 100% attendance, because Ofsted. No hope of private, spent a fortune on tutoring trying and failing to get her into selective grammar, only other decent school so oversubscribed it's barely decent any more. Anyway if I move her she'll lose the only friends she has. The education system is completely and utterly fucked. This feels like a dystopian nightmare.

I would like to see more international comparisons. Do other countries include all children their stats or do they have a greater proportion in special schools and measured differently? Do they have more support for mental health issues or are they just less prevalent because the society is structured differently?

I actually think that our education system is far kinder than many others so I do wonder what’s going wrong.

I think going to school 5 days a week is too much. In France, it's 4 days a week. School is not for education in the Uk. it's designed as a place to keep your kids while parents contribute to our shit economy. This country doesn't care about education, unless its private

I don't see any system collapsing. The system is maybe inadequate but certainly, I would not dramatise that something is collapsing. Many countries have even worse educational systems... and it is not collapsing

in France secondary school children go to school every day except Wednesday afternoon as it was traditionally reserved for religious studies

We used to live in Germany, school attendance was very high in part because they do the opposite of the UK and encourage students to stay home if they have any signs of illness. This keeps bugs from ripping through whole classes.

Same in Austria, they have absolutely no issues with children staying home for illness. If it's 1-2 weeks then you might need a doctor's note but there's no pressure at all from the school's side when the child comes back. But there is also the idea that school is simply "non-negotiable". There have been no news articles or any issues post-Covid regarding attendance. School starting times are also insanely early, 7:30-8:00am, but doesn't seem to affect attendance.

Homeschooling is not allowed at all in Austria. There are no support networks, curriculum or communities for home schooling, so many parents who would have contemplated that don't bother in the end. It makes a huge difference when the option of doing so is taken away.

Another factor which may be good or bad is that SEN recognition is low. Hyperactive kids are classed as "spirited", autistic kids might be "shy" and there's the culture of treating all children as if they were NT, starting from nursery age. The overall tolerance for a wide spectrum of behaviour is much higher, whereas the incentive to get problematic kids diagnosed is much lower, if that makes sense.

The result being that most parents believe their kids are "normal" (neurotypical so to speak) and therefore have no real excuses not to go to school. Kids get forced into a routine and most adapt to it fairly well. The only kids who do get diagnosed are extreme outliers, and there are special classes or schools that offer additional support.

It's a giant collapse waiting to happen, let's put it that way. They are closing their eyes to the huge structural failings at every level in every area, are slaves to the outrage that is Ofsted, are trying to convince parents that schools are a safe and positive place to be, and that all kids should be in mainstream school till 16 with all kinds of appalling behaviours tolerated.

To the point that the kids who want to learn either can't find a place at all, or have to go to a school where thugs and riffraff are running the show. The same thugs not only leave school with zero GCSEs, they get rewarded and taken on trips for showing up every day and behaving like thugs, ruining it all for the decent kids who should be getting 9 GCSEs but will only get a handful through HE because of the MH issues created by having to deal with thuggery swearing and ignored abuse on a daily basis.

This is what's happening to my daughter. All the teachers' hard work (and they really do try, at this place) is in vain because they are absolutely obsessed with keeping all of them in school wearing stupid uniforms, when half of the kids would do far better leaving school and learning a trade when they turn 12.

It is shit, pointless and depressing.

Children are way too young to learn the trade at 12. Innmany countries they go to learn the trade at 14/15.

I assure you that there will be no collapse :)) Thugs are in every school and has always been. That is why people move houses to send the child to the better school or send them private.

Try and assure someone else, you don't convince me in the slightest. There is a tipping point in any crisis and my area is already in crisis. There are no options available to my daughter.

People USED to move house and/or go private. Neither option feasible for most, certainly not for me and in any case knife crime and drugs are out of control everywhere. That wasn't the case 30 years ago when drugs weren't seen as normal.

There is an insistence on applying old models to unprecedented situations and refusal to look at the red flags. Why.

another factor is that in many EU countries the school day is far shorter. Secondary aged kids can go home at 1:20pm in Germany. So it is not so full on. I am not sure attendance is higher either, I don't even know if they track it or have targets. I don't know where the data that attendance is higher elsewhere comes from. It's such an obsession here. A tick the box exercise. These scare stories of "if you child's attendance is below 95% they are of severe risk of underachievement!!!" are absolutely insane.

It's sad to see how many on here are so committed to misunderstanding school refusal.
I am just so relieved both of mine are now out of the school system, and have every sympathy for all those students and children still stuck in it.

Students and teachers, not students and children.

It's taken over a month for a whooping cough test to be sent for my child. Back and forth to the doctors with chest infection and sent back into school after the 48 hours of antibiotics. Missing school most weeks after being sick coughing so much. His attendance will have dipped. Not preventable. I have another child that's asthmatic and when it's not controlled they have to have time off due to hospitalisations. You have the attendance letters, e mails, meetings. It doesn't change the fact your children are genuinely unwell. I think they need to manage attendance differently.

I do homeschooling when my children are home and feel up to it. They have policies in place when they can't go in if they have been sick for 48-62 hours. I can't change that. So it's something I can do to help them not miss education. Due to my eldest asthma it makes things difficult as I do a zero hour contract as it's hard to predict.

What can "collapse" is a specific school if the behaviour and educational expectatins are not met.
But if you look countrywide it is not like every single school is bad.
I am very sorry for your experience. Yes, the world is not fair and there are rich and poor not since today and associated with it access to better schools - private or because of postcode.

But in Germany they got load of homework. In UK the assumption is that a child should be able to meet expectations if they learn only at school