I spent most of my Year 8 maths lessons in a toilet. No one ever really noticed, no one came looking for me, and I endured the smelly, smoky, unsafe cubicles, with Year 11 bullies lurking outside, because it was miles better than the alternative. Or so it seemed at the time.

Getting children into school is only part of the crisis in pupil attendance. Just because a child turns up to school, it does not always mean that they attend every lesson.

Of course, this is nothing new, as my own maths avoidance techniques demonstrate. However, it has, in many schools, recently become horrifically worse.

Internal truancy: what’s the scale of the problem?

The true extent of the problem is difficult to capture, as gathering lesson-by-lesson attendance data is not statutory. But anecdotally, every headteacher I speak to acknowledges that the scale of the problem is almost impossible to manage.

In the same way that during the pandemic some students experienced selective technical difficulties in accessing online lessons for certain subjects, so, too, are some now avoiding those lessons in person.

Read more:

How to fix attendance: a research view of what works

How to deal with internal truancy

We can’t fix attendance by punishing families

But why? Sometimes it’s because they don’t like the teacher or other students in the class; sometimes they find it really difficult, struggle to understand the work or simply find it boring. Occasionally, encouraged by friends, they get a better offer to do something more enjoyable. Essentially, they are channel-hopping their lessons.

This matters because when children are not where they are supposed to be, it is a huge safeguarding risk. If we can’t see them, we cannot confirm that they are safe. If we don’t know where they are, we are failing both the children and their families. We can’t just leave them alone; lessons are not optional and they are not self-directing their time.

How to tackle internal truancy

At its worst, my school was logging 200 AWOLs (absent-without-leave incidents) a day. We knew this because all teachers took registers every lesson, all staff logged students that had not arrived to their lessons, and then we went out looking for missing children to return them to where they were meant to be.

I’ve knocked on toilet doors, squeezed between fences and crawled through bushes more times than I care to mention now. But it has worked.

Consistent communication between teachers and pastoral staff, relentless tracking down of the missing, and persistent consequences for those making the wrong decisions have been key.

However, building stronger, warmer relationships in classrooms, lots of preventative work with the greatest flight risks, some identification of AWOL hot spots and times (such as immediately after a mock exam) and having Pampas grass chopped down have been just as important.

We are now down to an average of five AWOLs a day, although we notice a slight rise on days when there are more supply teachers on site. It is a problem that has not gone away but continues to be one of our top priorities: not just attendance to school but attendance to every lesson.

Keziah Featherstone is executive headteacher of Q3 Academy Tipton, a part of The Mercian Trust. She is also co-founder and a strategic lead of WomenEd, as well as being a member of the Headteachers’ Roundtable