The Covid hangover in schools has been longer and more unpleasant than many expected, or is widely acknowledged.
Perhaps the most visible manifestation is the sharp rise in persistent absenteeism - pupils missing more than 10 per cent of sessions over a school year.
Prior to the pandemic, around 11 per cent of pupils were persistently absent, it’s now double that. For secondary schools, it’s running at 27 per cent.
Persistently absent pupils
Predictably, the numbers are worse for older pupils and those from lower-income families. Analysis from FFT Education Datalab found half of all pupil premium-eligible Year 10 students were persistently absent last autumn term. This is extremely concerning and risks further widening attainment gaps.
As FFT Datalab notes, “persistent absence” is not a perfect measure by any means. It doesn’t distinguish between pupils who have a single lengthy period of absence, often due to a more serious illness or injury, versus those who are in and out of school more regularly.
It is the latter group we really need to worry about, as they tend to stay persistently absent term after term. But this isn’t a false alarm, Covid does seem to have led to an ongoing and significant reduction in pupils regularly attending school.
To date, we have little research as to why. At least some of the problem this year was caused by elevated illness rates over winter, with plenty of Covid still around as well as a bad flu season.
A change in attitudes
We may see a natural reduction over time. But there is clearly something else going on, too. Anecdotally, school leaders I speak to say we are seeing a more casual attitude to school attendance - not just from pupils, but from their parents, too.
This makes intuitive sense. Long periods of lockdown, and regular isolations outside of full lockdowns, may have changed social norms around attendance, in the way they have around commuting for adult workers.
We may not know for some years whether this is a permanent shift in attitudes or something that will wear off as we gain distance from lockdowns.
In the meantime, the government has highlighted its concern about the problem but without offering much in the way of support to schools. In truth, it’s not an issue that lends itself to immediate national policy solutions. There are no simple levers to pull.
Nevertheless, it would be nice to see a bit more activity than a handful of attendance advisers and a small test scheme in Middlesborough.
A lack of long-term approaches
To do so, though, would require taking a wider strategic approach than the Department for Education currently seems capable of doing. The long-term effects of Covid go well beyond attendance. We have also seen a massive and ongoing spike in mental health referrals, something that was already trending heavily in the wrong direction pre-pandemic.
The cost-of-living crisis has hit nearly all families hard, but for those with the lowest incomes, it has been devastating, with food inflation meaning around a fifth of all young people are in families that say they can’t afford enough food.
There is significant overlap across these different challenges. Parents struggling financially - to the point of hunger - are less likely to be worrying about attendance. Pupils are more likely to have mental health problems if they are from lower-income families, and are more likely to be persistently absent.
We are seeing the effects of this cumulative array of problems not just on attendance, but also on behaviour.
Teacher Tapp surveys are finding more teachers reporting that lessons are being disrupted and more saying that behaviour is their biggest cause of work-related stress. Which is, in turn, one of many contributing factors to worsening staff retention rates.
Time for a plan
The government missed the opportunity in 2021 to formulate a proper, costed recovery plan for schools. Instead, we’ve drifted into an ongoing and chronically worse situation for pupils, parents and teachers.
If that was the best time to do something, though, the second best time is now. Moreover, the plan they scrapped back then was focused on academic recovery - but it’s increasingly clear that that isn’t the problem.
What we need is a pastoral recovery plan that puts significant resources into figuring out why things have got so bad and what it will take to at least get back to where we were.
Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education
