Teachers are well accustomed to calling out names on registers and finding the odd child absent. Since the pandemic, however, numbers of “ghost children” have ballooned to what is now widely acknowledged to be a national crisis.
In England, more than 1.7 million “persistently absent” pupils missed 10% or more of their school time last autumn, according to government figures. A further 125,000 “severely absent” children spent less than half their time in school.
These missing pupils are invariably described as “invisible”, “lost” and “vanished”. To their teachers and peers, they might appear as challenging – unable to follow the most fundamental rule of the classroom: to show up. But data tells us that it is the most vulnerable children in our society who are most prone to persistent absence.
Sometimes pupils are suffering from crushing anxiety and depression that means they are unable to leave their room, much less get through the school day. For others, poverty, parental mental illness or the impact of domestic violence mean they are grappling with social and emotional difficulties.
A staggering 50% of disadvantaged pupils in year 10 have been persistently absent, according to one report. Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds who are eligible for free school meals are three times more likely to be severely absent than peers whose families are on higher incomes. That ratio is the same for those who receive special educational needs and disabilities (Send) support, while Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children have significantly higher levels of absence than other ethnic groups.
Such severe rates of absence should haunt Conservative politicians and their supporters who were too weak or callous to oppose a decade of austerity measures that sowed the seeds for this crisis in classrooms. But a report last month by the Centre for Social Justice, one of whose directors is former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, sheds light on how the Tories really view this crisis.
The centre’s chief executive, Andy Cook, laments that “alongside stunting academic attainment, children with a history of school absence are around three times more likely to commit an offence than those who routinely attend school”. The report triggered a flurry of sensationalist headlines: Covid’s “lost” pupils will cause a huge crimewave; a “wave of young criminals” will flood the streets.
Such staggering levels of absence undoubtedly jeopardise the future of these young people and should be incentive enough for meaningful action from a Conservative government supposedly invested in creating “opportunity right across the country”.
Framing the crisis in terms of potential criminality, rather than the measures needed to make a difference to these woeful rates of absence, is a convenient exercise in shifting responsibility from government on to the shoulders of some of the most disadvantaged children.
Since 2013, there has been a 46% reduction in the number of educational welfare officers – the people whose job it is to break down the hurdles to children attending school. Early intervention funding for schemes such as Sure Start has been cut by £1.7bn – almost two-thirds – since 2010, while youth services lost £660m in the same period.
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) are overstretched and buckling under soaring demand. Nearly all headteachers polled say funding for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities is insufficient. Only the disingenuous would claim this bears no relation to the reality that it is the same pupils who are most prone to absence.
When those of us on the left repeatedly sounded the alarm about the impending and terrible consequences of Tory austerity, we appealed to a sense of compassion, arguing that to implement such swingeing cuts to our public services constituted a moral failing that would haunt us in years to come. Thirteen years on, current absence figures testify to the importance of vital services that provide mental health support and early years intervention to struggling families.
It goes without saying that our attention should focus less on the proportion of pupils who may find themselves engaging in antisocial or criminal activities as a result of weeks and months outside classrooms, and more on how prolonged isolation traps young people in damaging social circumstances. There is more to school than exam grades, and this must be urgently recognised. School imparts life skills, friendships and wider cultural awareness that remain with children beyond their formal education. It is an anchor to society.
To start addressing the complex range of difficulties affecting these young people, increased funding is the only answer. Decades of underfunding has created such desperate need, it will not be enough to simply put back what the Tories ransacked from public services; the scale of the problem within education requires funding beyond pre-austerity levels. Severe and persistent absence rates prove what many of us warned: cuts would cost us dearly and the most vulnerable are paying the highest price.
To cast them as would-be criminals in order to focus minds on the severity of this crisis should not be interpreted as concern for our young people’s futures, but a shameful unwillingness to give a truthful account of how we got into this situation and how we might get out of it.
Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer focusing on race, politics, education and feminism
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