“Dig deep and come back,” pleaded the education secretary, as the fall in exam grades again put the focus on the worryingly high levels of absence in many schools.
Gillian Keegan is right to encourage all children to return to the classroom, although even she would accept that it will take a little more than just encouragement from politicians to get back to where we were before Covid.
Anyone who has had contact with young people who are reluctant to go to school knows that it’s complicated.
Covid impact on school absence
There are some children who were sailing through school before the pandemic who have since become too anxious to sustain attendance on a regular basis. Others simply haven’t returned at all.
One parent contacted me sobbing at 11.30pm, having watched me talking about the issue of school absence on TV. “‘I need to go to bed to get up for work in the morning but I’m waiting for my 15-year-old to get up to make sure he eats something,” she said.
Her son, once sporty and popular at school, hadn’t returned to the classroom since the pandemic and was now spending much of his day gaming online.
He said he couldn’t get his confidence up enough to go around the corner to the sports hall to play football - a game he once loved. His parent said: “All over our city, you can hear microwaves pinging at midnight as teenagers wake up and go looking for food.”
School absence is one of the biggest education issues of our time. More than a quarter of secondary students in England were recorded as being “persistently absent” in the latest school year. That number rises to 30 per cent for Year 11 children - a crucial year. For disadvantaged children, persistent absence rises to a staggering 40 per cent.
Attendance teams overwhelmed
Recently a secondary school head told me that 500 of their children were persistently absent from school, with 200 of them coming in for less than half of the time they should. Their small attendance team was overwhelmed.
One twentysomething teacher said to me: “I didn’t think not going to school was even an option when I was young. It feels like lots of children don’t think that now.”
It is not just a British problem either. Last month I travelled to Toronto to join educationalists from around the world who are all battling poor school attendance rates in their own countries.
The Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids estimates that globally half a billion children have not returned to the classroom regularly since lockdown. Well over 100,000 children are thought to be absent from school in Canada and there are as many as 70 million children in India who didn’t return to school.
In Uganda, where under-18s constitute 55 per cent of the population, there are estimates that almost half haven’t returned to regularly attending school.
In some countries children have joined the workforce instead.
A problem we must tackle now
Complex family situations make consistent attendance more difficult, and poor mental health and anxiety are factors everywhere. Some children have just got out of the habit of going to school. Removing the barriers to non-attendance for so long during lockdowns has made them more difficult to re-establish since the pandemic.
Relationship-based, bespoke support, along with a relevant, inclusive and engaging curriculum and approach, and much better children’s mental health services, are seen universally as the solutions.
While soaring non-attendance is a global phenomenon, it is down to us to develop solutions here for the tens of thousands of our own children who are being drastically under-educated. As Sir Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust, put it: “If you don’t go to school, you’re in deep trouble. You’re not going to be able to do well in your exams or anything else”.
Clearly the education secretary recognises the depth and scale of the problem. It’s now time for the prime minister to wake up to the threat it poses to our economic future, and acknowledge that schools can’t do much more without far greater central support.
And if he’s looking for a new pledge for the next election, how about a promise to raise school attendance back to pre-pandemic levels?
Anne Longfield CBE is chair of the Commission on Young Lives and a former children’s commissioner for England
