This year’s most alarming statistic so far is that one parent in four thinks it is fine for children to skip school. Persistent absenteeism in England has doubled since lockdown, from 10% to 22% of pupils. A third of a million parents are now being fined as a result. With working from home now good for grownups, the habit is clearly spreading to schoolchildren.
This week both education secretary, Gillian Keegan, and the opposition’s Bridget Phillipson are pushing proposals to combat truancy. They are laying the fault squarely at the front door of the home. Nonattendance is due variously to poverty, parental neglect or rising evidence of stress and mental illness among teenagers, which has reportedly doubled since lockdown.
In other words, hardly a whisper of blame is directed at schools or at the nature and content of their teaching. While primary schools have made real efforts over recent years to research and update their work, secondary schools have gone backwards. They have plunged ever deeper into a world of academic rote-learning, examination and “performance”, based on centralised measurement. Schools have been inflicted with fatuous Ofsted adjectives, so demoralising as to drive one headteacher to suicide.
It is reasonable to conclude that children avoid school because they find it hostile, disturbing and largely pointless. From the age of 11 – by when they should have acquired essential literacy and numeracy – they are afflicted with what is at root an archaic academic traditionalism. They must devote fixed blocs of time to memorising material of minimal future use, and on which they are constantly tested – as if data digitisation and computing had never been invented. Maths professor Hugh Burkhardt says British classrooms are the only places people still do “heavy arithmetic by hand”.
It is almost unbelievable that the secondary curriculum and teaching methods have changed little since Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Educational research now stresses the need to prepare young people in creativity and teamwork, in physical and mental fitness, and in skills relevant to the modern world of work – and play.
Last month’s parliamentary report on the content of schooling was devastating. Former education secretary Kenneth Baker highlighted a collapse in technical subjects of between 70% and 80% in the last 13 years, while creative subjects such as drama, performing arts, music and dance had dropped by 50%. Fewer than half of children do enough sport, while obesity soars. As for knowledge of money, civics, law, health and social skills, forget it.
Confining British secondary schooling to academia’s dark ages is not just senseless, it no longer carries any conviction with ever larger numbers of parents or children. Its market is collapsing. Education remains the most vital and dedicated of professions. There is no need for it to be the most reactionary, just because politicians like it that way.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
