The government must tackle school absenteeism in a holistic way - not with draconian punishment

23 July 2024, 17:18

By Natasha Devon MBE

@_NatashaDevon

In the run up to the election, much was (correctly) made of the dire state of the NHS and the gargantuan task our new government would have on its hands as it attempted to fix it. Yet our education system is in just as much peril.

The conversation around education was seemingly hijacked with the VAT for private schools policy in the Labour manifesto, which left little opportunity to interrogate the challenges being faced in the state sector.

Not only has the problem with RAAC (unsafe concrete used for school buildings) not yet been resolved, there’s also been an increasing expectation that schools will plug gaps caused by austerity in mental health and social services with dwindling funding and resources. The IFS think tank has said there have been historically large cuts to spending per pupil. Add to that the mountains of extra paperwork school staff are expected to contend with and it's little wonder that there’s a retention crisis in the profession.

But it’s not just teachers who don’t want to be in schools – pupils are also increasingly unable or unwilling to attend. While the more predictable corners of the British press are intent on painting them as ‘truant’ or ‘skiving’, their reasons are, in my opinion, just as understandable as teachers’.

There is, of course, the significant cohort who aren’t receiving the support they need for debilitating mental health issues or SEND (Special Education Needs/Disability). Then there is Long COVID – the exact statistics around this are murky, what with long COVID being a relatively new and misunderstood condition, but last year an ITV report estimated it could be affecting around 70,000 young people in the UK.

Despite absenteeism being up 60% on pre-pandemic levels, it would be a mistake to attribute the entire crisis to the pandemic. The government's own figures place absences owing to illness at around 10%. What of the other 90%?

This is anecdotal, but my work visiting an average of three schools per week throughout the UK during term-time puts me on fairly solid ground, I think. There are dual crises, in my opinion.

One is of young people not feeling safe at school, because of the decimation of their safety nets (teaching assistants and education psychologists being just two casualties of austerity measures). The other is of it being an unbearably hateful experience for them because the activities which gave them pleasure or respite have slowly disappeared from the school week.

Back in 2012 I wrote to then-Education Secretary Michael Gove warning him of the consequences of his ‘academia focussed’ curriculum. It was also something I was outspoken about as the first ever government mental health tsar between 2015 and 2016.

Placing fairly arbitrary yet ambitious targets on literacy and numeracy while also slashing budgets for subjects with a proven therapeutic value (sports, art, music, drama) was always going to have a massive impact. At the same time, funding was cut for PSHE (Personal Social, Health and Economic Education) which gives children the tools they need to face challenges they experience in childhood and adolescence.

At the end of their tenure, the former Tory government patted itself on the back for ‘increasing attainment’ in education, based, I can only imagine, on stats which didn’t take into account the number of children who have been ‘off rolled’ (suspended because their grades or behaviour would affect a school’s Ofsted rating and therefore funding) or unable to attend.

We also saw some draconian attempts at solutions to absenteeism under the Conservatives. These were largely confined to heavy-handed crackdowns and attempts to punish parents through fines, which didn’t take into account the root causes of so-called school refusal.

Let us hope the new government take a different, more holistic view and seek to restore what has been lost in British education. There is, famously, no magic money tree, but without investment in our children and young people there can be none of the promised ‘growth’ either.