When it comes to addressing what the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has called “the biggest problem facing education” - school attendance - Carolyn Gentle-Genitty has plenty of ideas.

Across a career spanning more than 25 years in higher education, she has garnered a reputation as a leading light in research into antisocial behaviour in young people, including social bonding and persistent absence, and she has worked with government agencies in the US on boosting engagement and preventing persistent absence in education.

She has also worked with schools to develop and implement a number of interventions to help reduce absenteeism and dropout rates.

She is a professor at the Indiana University School of Social Work, vice president and co-founder of the International Network of School Attendance (INSA), which is based in Australia, and former president of the International Association of Truancy and Dropout Prevention in the US.

Her expertise has perhaps never been more needed. The UK is facing what has been called an “attendance crisis”: Department for Education data released in May 2023 showed that almost a quarter of pupils had been persistently absent during the 2022 autumn term. And despite recent efforts by the government to tackle the problem, absence rates remain high.

Here, Gentle-Genitty, who is also the CEO of Pivot Attendance Solutions, talks to Tes about her work and how it can be applied to help leaders create learning environments that support young people back into school.

Tes: In the UK, many schools are currently struggling more with persistent absence in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Have you seen a similar pattern in the US and, if so, why do you think this is happening?

Gentle-Genitty: We are certainly seeing the same here in the US. In fact, it’s twice the rate as before Covid: around 16 million children were truant or chronically absent last year, research showed.

I was discussing this with a colleague who visited from Australia recently and she described much of the same, as did others I spoke to at our last INSA conference - colleagues from around the globe, places like Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and Belgium. It’s a worldwide problem.

Before the pandemic, we were all good rule followers around the world, right? They told us to go to school, we followed through and we thought that was the way forward.

But the pandemic lasted so long. If it was a blip, maybe three months, or even six months, we would have been fine and we could go back into our old routines.

But because the pandemic lasted - at least for most people - about three years of the academic cycle, that gave kids three years of experimenting with new processes and refining them over time. Those kids didn’t know anything else before, but now they do.

It’s exactly what’s happening now with workers. Workers were good rule followers before; they knew they had to drive to work and do all these things. And now we want to work remotely, not commute for two hours and arrange childcare.

But because we live in a schooling-dependent economy, parents must work. And therefore we must find a way for kids to be engaged in education. If the kids are not in school, the parents are not free to go to work. And if they’re not free to go to work, we cannot produce. And if we cannot produce, the economy doesn’t grow. So there is a cyclical process that’s going on.

How much do we know about the common causes of young people avoiding school?

We know a lot. We know many of the causes of children choosing to avoid school.

It’s always a personal experience, and that experience can be linked to economics, family, peers, transportation, perceptions, fears, belonging and even a lack of psychological safety. [To learn more about how schools can create a sense of belonging, see our webinar with world-renowned expert Owen Eastwood.]

All of it is personal. It is really about how that particular pupil is experiencing that particular environment and the people with whom they interact in that context. Those are the key pillars of any person who avoids school. Ultimately, they are avoiding hurt or pain.

And that is what school leaders and administrators have to recognise: the significance of when a child has been absent for a period of time and actively chooses to come back. They have expectations upon return. The child is giving the school a second chance. They want the school to help meet their needs.

If there’s another breakdown in providing care and support, the child perceives that something is still not right; somebody still does not care. They’re back to feeling: “Nobody worries about me, my needs are not being met, the school is still not a safe environment.”

And are there common profiles of pupils who are likely to be absent a lot?

I would be cautious about profiles; profiles are like theories, which are only ever best guesses and are only relevant to the data we have at that time.

Pupils who are likely to be absent a lot present a mismatch between school and pupil expectations, which vary by person and type of absence. There’s school avoidance, school refusal and school withdrawal, among other types.

INSA recently produced a research anthology on school attendance problems that outlines this, in association with the Swedish special educational needs foundation Jerring Fonden.

‘Any person who avoids school is ultimately avoiding hurt or pain’

But there is variation. For example, my son, very early on, was considered to have unauthorised absences because when I would go to a different country to do research, I would take him out of school. But because I contacted the school and got his lessons, my son was given “excused” status. He was able to do school while we were away.

Other parents, with less “exotic” reasons to take their children out of school, like being evicted and having to relocate to a Motel 6 [a chain of low-cost hotels in North America], may get unexcused absences.

Likewise, when absent for sickness, we may be required to bring in a note from a doctor. [In the US] a lot of well-resourced people have a doctor that they can consistently get that kind of note from, whereas those with limited resources often do not have the same access. These are inequities that persist for those populations.

What are some of the major things for schools to consider around addressing persistent absence?

Care and show care. We know that the absolute best way to tackle persistent absence is with care. That means building the right relationships, providing safe schools and putting caring adults into the system.

Those are the things that really change what we can or cannot do, and whether or not pupils and parents trust us to deliver on those things that we say we will do for them.

Right now, we’re not always doing that. And we’re not incentivising schools to bring back pupils in a lot of cases.

In the US, there’s a model where the federal government allocates a certain amount of money to each state for education and the state gives that money to each school district.

In about six states, they hold back some of that money and say to schools, if a pupil were to be persistently absent, we will give you back this money for every child you are able to bring back into the school environment. That’s an incentive model for addressing persistent absence.

Our other states don’t have that, and in those states, persistent absence is higher.

It goes without saying that this model comes with the added benefit of allocating resources for improvements to school climate and community partnerships in responding to persistent absence.

Our current systems are also not effective at welcoming pupils back if absent for long periods. For instance, a pupil who returns rarely hears from administrators: “You’re welcome back any time, half a day, mid semester. We have a team of people to onboard you and get you caught up with your coursework on weekends or online.”

That model is available for some kids, such as those who have been suspended, but we don’t have it for the children who have been persistently absent, for some reason.

How much of a factor does the school’s relationship with parents play in preventing and addressing persistent absence?

It’s complex. School and parent relationships do account for a great deal when it comes to preventing and addressing persistent absence.

Schools always want to have a good relationship with parents, but parents often don’t want to have a high-touch relationship with the school.

It’s an outsourced model - like hiring a plumber to fix a leak. Once hired, the homeowner trusts the plumber to fix the leak with very little input from them, other than to pay the bill. In a similar way, parents have outsourced the care of their child’s education to the school.

Parents expect schools to be the experts. When problems arise, they expect schools to offer solutions. When these are unavailable, ineffective or disenfranchise their children, the school-parent relationship becomes strained.

A lot of parents see schools as a kind of retail process, interacting with the school only when something is not working, like calling customer service. And that’s a hard perspective to change.

Then there are the issues of balancing work and communication with the school. If parents are at work, travelling for an hour to talk to a teacher, an hour for the appointment and an hour back, that’s three hours of unpaid labour. They want to know about their child and be engaged but not at the loss of income.

So, really, they only want to be called when something’s wrong. And as a school, how do you fix that?

What have you seen that does work?

There are some schools I’m working with right now that have adopted a really intense data tracking system. It sends out text messages to parents, giving them a summary of how their children are doing and providing them with that pattern of attendance so that they can see exactly what is happening and how the school has intervened.

Traditionally, a child can very easily determine the culture of a school and realise that, for example, they could go five days absent before a teacher would check up or tell a parent.

Here in the US, kids know when we send automatic letters home, so they run home and try to get the mail before their parents do. They know the patterns. And that means, in some cases, it could go 15 or 20 days before a parent even knows that a child has not been in school.

‘We know that the absolute best way to tackle persistent absence is with care’

But there are these almost artificial intelligence-type systems that can track absences of whole days, half days and, in some cases, specific subjects, so parents can get that really granular type of information.

Most schools do generally collect that data but they rarely examine the patterns in behaviour or have documented interventions to show staff and parents.

The pupils know that their needs are not being met because the schools are not paying attention to it and their parents aren’t paying attention to it.

So, I’d say that tools to help manage that data should be embraced. And it can save time, too.

When schools interact with parents, it’s often not to have any kind of earth-shattering conversations - it’s really just to share information and data, which doesn’t require an in-person meeting.

These tools mean parents can get automated updates about their children, and schools can easily get necessary information into parents’ hands. It’s a win-win.

Is there anything that can help schools to identify pupils who might be at risk of becoming persistently absent?

We know that the way kids get out of the classroom and play together can make a big difference around absence.

There’s been some really good work looking at play, what happens during recess and the link to persistent absence. Are these kids being bullied? Are they left on their own when they’re on the playground? Who intervenes? Do they have friends?

It’s been found that play in recess is a good microcosm to predict which kids will be absent, and how often they will be absent, because it’s those kids that they’re interacting with on a regular basis that they want to get away from, or they see that the teacher didn’t do anything, and they get mad at the teacher and don’t feel safe.

Using socioemotional learning tools can help to get to the bottom of those feelings, and improve pupil perceptions of teachers.

Why does all this matter so much? What do we know about the long-term effects of missing school for young people?

When we talk about the long-term impact of pupils not engaging in education, we know all about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 28 [which says that all children and young people have the right to education].

But it’s about much more than that. Being out of school also means that the child is not sufficiently socialised. Pupils need to learn more than the curriculum. We need to know how to interact with each other, how to play together, how to work in teams, how to think differently, how to build trust, how to engage in healthy relationships and that does not happen if we’re just at home, or by ourselves.

This is why the mental health crisis is worsening because a lot of kids were so caught up in their own repeated negative thoughts during the pandemic. At school, somebody would have said: “Don’t worry about that! Let’s play! Let’s continue our stuff.” But during the pandemic, that didn’t happen.

The important part of schooling socialisation is that it helps a society prepare its citizens for productive contribution to the workforce: a contribution that allows them to be creative, happy, kind, caring and able to work to meet their needs.

When pupils miss the opportunity to engage in education and to learn these fundamental principles, that poses a risk to society - a risk that’s detrimental to our human existence and living together in a safe world.

Carolyn Gentle-Genitty was speaking to freelance writer Zofia Niemtus