New school year, same old rhetoric. Bridget Phillipson has launched her now customary exhortation to schools and parents to ensure children attend school from the first week of the academic year.
Why? Because children who miss their first week of school are more likely to become persistently absent and their future prospects will be damaged to the extent that they are likely to earn £10,000 a year less.
As the education secretary notes, absenteeism in schools is falling but is still above pre-pandemic rates. The trouble is, absenteeism as she describes it (with its connotations of families conspiring with children to skive) is not the issue.
The real problem is education policy, which pits schools against families and is overseeing an exodus of children, especially those with special educational needs.
It’s easy to bash parents. We’re used to it. I’m used to it. My daughter didn’t go to secondary school because of anxiety. Both my children are neurodivergent. I’m a bad parent.
Lots of parents feel this way because that’s how the education system makes them feel.
Instead of heaping pressure on them, we should think about the corporate parent, the DfE, the body which is administering our allegedly universal education system.
What Phillipson’s statement didn’t address is the 350,000 children missing from education, or the approximately 180,000 children who are severely absent (two-and-a-half times more than pre-pandemic levels), or the 60-per cent rise in home-educated children since Covid, three-quarters of whom opt out because their families say schools can’t meet their needs.
It’s easy to bash parents. We’re used to it
Then there are the exclusion and suspension figures, both up by two-thirds over the past two years, overwhelmingly affecting children have additional needs. These combined figures point to an increasingly less inclusive system, or to put it another way, state enforced absenteeism.
Teachers are caught in the crossfire: fielding parental anxiety while their own demands for better training remain unmet. Yet there are things that schools can do.
The first is obvious: listen to families. Your child not being able to go into school is the second most anxiety-inducing life events after the death of a close family member. Parents may have to give up their jobs. Their relationships with partners and their other children suffer.
Second, listen to children. Half of those who are unable to go to school experience anxiety at twice the diagnostic threshold. A recent study of 700 11- to 16-year-olds found that reducing the emotional burdens students experience in school could prevent decades of mental health struggles and save the lives of some neurodivergent adolescents and adults.
Listening means learning and developing a true partnership with families to offer the best hope for a school return. It means accepting that some things are not visible to schools.
A survey I carried out in Hackney found that parents were two-and-a-half times more likely to have identified a symptom in a child than a teacher. Six times as many parents noted suicidal ideation than they said schools did.
These findings are not surprising given that teachers have 30 pupils in their class, but they highlight the importance of listening to families to get a holistic understanding of a child’s experience.
In short, families feel the shame of their child’s absenteeism, which makes them defensive. Meanwhile, children feel their parents’ shame and blame themselves. So it’s up to schools to build trust and develop solutions with families. Validate them, connect them, encourage them to share their experiences.
You may learn that this polite child is self-harming and talks about killing himself at home, that this disruptive one just needs a safe, quiet place in school and that this child is late because their mind wanders.
You may learn how some of your policies are putting some children on a fast track to exclusion and how some others are hampering your attendance efforts. (For example, autistic children are often particularly sensitive to textures; try making them don an itchy uniform in the morning.)
It’s not just policy that has failed to keep up with changing needs; it’s political rhetoric too. A child risks losing an education every time a relationship between school and parent breaks down, and loose talk about absenteeism costs lives.
I totally agree with this. The single focus on attendance has lead to practices by some schools and academy Trusts that are there to break families and artificially inflate their figures. In my own experience my child , who is neurodivergent , was on roll at school in our local academy Trust but could not attend school for a year. My fight with them led to the Trust asking me if I was going to take them to court because of what came out in the senco statement. I successfully secured an EHCP and this gave my child a golden ticket to a non academy school which puts support and wellbeing over and above anything else both for the child and the parents. Now my child is doing her a levels and Is applying for university! The government MUST mandate policies that make schools and Trusts look at the way they engage children which builds trust and gives them a future. Our local academy went from Good to Requires improvement when it joined the Trust and its results continue to decline, pupil numbers are declining and staff retention is volatile. The biggest losers are the children and the community they serve but they aren’t accountable to anyone. They even have a local governance board with a chairperson who is a member of the Trust. Parents have no democratic right of redress as everything is controlled by the Trust. A toxic model run by toxic people.