Like most things, schools have never really recovered from the pandemic. Whether it’s student attainment, teachers leaving the profession or the attention span and behaviour of pupils, school life for many is harder than it has ever been. But absence is one area of particular and growing concern, as schools up and down the country attempt to reach the so-called ghost children: the thousands who never returned to the classroom after lockdown.
The worries about student absence that we teachers share with each other were confirmed this week by an alarming new report. It reveals that on an average day this year, one in 10 GCSE pupils in England have been absent from school – a rise of 70% since before the pandemic. According to the investigation, one in 20 year 11 students have missed at least half of their classes this year and around one in 100 are only attending school on an authorised part-time basis.
There will be those who deliberately misconstrue these facts as evidence of a wave of wokeness spreading across schools, allowing children to go part-time owing to nothing but run-of-the-mill teenage mood swings. But spend even a day as a teacher (particularly in a state school in a deprived area where underfunding and poverty compound every issue) and you’ll see the truth: the causes of this national absence problem are complicated, ranging from declining mental health to the cost of living crisis, government policy and societal shifts.
On the one hand, we have the undeniable fact that our world has changed since the pandemic began. Hybrid and home working are here to stay. In fact, a third of UK workers report that they would quit a job if asked to return to the office full-time. But if we can accept that the convenience, comfort and safety of being able to work from home is a legitimate lifestyle choice for adults, why are we so unable to acknowledge that the same might be true of teenagers who are navigating the extra challenges of puberty and growing up in an increasingly complex world?
Admittedly, I wouldn’t advocate for full-time remote schooling for most children in the UK. Enough parents have flashbacks of trying to home-school children through lockdowns, and children need the social development of interacting with peers. But for some young people – those with sensitive mental health needs, those dealing with particularly challenging life circumstances or those who are neurodiverse and may thrive in the familiarity and routine of home – the pandemic offered an alternative vision of how their life could look, and then we whipped it from under their feet.
Many parents cite the chronic underfunding of children’s mental health services as a key reason their child is unable or unwilling to return to the classroom. For these parents, keeping their child at home isn’t about educational indifference but rather doing everything they can to keep their child safe with no government support, years-long waiting lists and the prospect of a third of referrals being denied help anyway.
But it’s not all about seeing home as a safe haven. I know from working in one of the most deprived areas in the country that many young people are forced to miss school by the harsh realities of life in a cost of living crisis – and as rates of child destitution and in-work poverty soar, it’s difficult to see this problem diminishing any time soon.
No correct school shoes. No clean uniform. Having to look after younger siblings because of unsustainable childcare fees or parental illness. Homelessness or housing instability. Being unable to afford basic hygiene products such as sanitary towels or shampoo. Taking on a job to help with the bills. Attending benefits or immigration meetings to translate for parents. These are all real reasons children are forced to miss school – and the most heartbreaking and frustrating fact is that so often these are the young people who most desperately want to be in the classroom learning.
Let us not forget: these factors are not naturally occurring. They have not sprung out of thin air. These are the direct result of a deliberate, state-manufactured hostile environment for certain sections of society and the culmination of more than a decade of austerity that has decimated the support that the most vulnerable communities need. These young people are not skiving off school to have a crafty smoke. They are forced into adulthood by a government that has cut every single thing that could help them to get to school in the morning.
But it is politically expedient for a Conservative party with a penchant for cutting vital services to lay blame at the feet of schools and parents. This government seems to expect teachers to plug the gap and become specialist child psychologists (at the same time as getting kids through their maths and English GCSEs), while doubling down on its commitment to fine and even prosecute parents for their children’s persistent absence.
I have never known of a school that doesn’t go the extra mile to make sure students are in school, and this is almost always done through the (unpaid) extra labour of teachers and pastoral staff, or by using up the school’s own budget. Whether it’s paying home visits to the houses of at-risk children and so-called “school refusers” to get them to their exams on time, dispensing resources to make sure key learning isn’t missed at home, or providing free meals for students who aren’t technically eligible in an effort to entice them in to improve their attendance, schools and teachers are already doing everything we can. And we’re doing it in the face of a cost of living crisis and a staff attrition problem of unprecedented scale.
But schools can’t do it all. And if our politicians are truly concerned about pupil absence levels, it’s time they themselves were a little less absent in addressing the problem.
Nadeine Asbali is a secondary school teacher in London
