Lessons from the left behind: The lifelong consequences of missing school

The reasons for persistently missing school are varied and often personal, but for children with unstable personal lives the stakes are always higher – even before the pandemic, writes Harry Thompson

Last academic year, 35 million names on the register went unanswered (Getty/iStock)

Sitting on the pavement on Oxford Street, between the entrance to Gap and the Underground station, Darryl is explaining how he was expelled from his school in Bromsgrove at the age of 14. “I was a little s**t, but I got blamed for things I didn’t do. I’d had a governors’ meeting where they said I had 10 strikes and I was out, but they booted me out on my sixth for absconding.”

But absconding from school is rarely an isolated issue. “When I was 12 my parents split,” he continues. “My maternal nan brought me up, but when my dad kept the house she had to move out.” Left alone with his father Darryl, now 40, recalls how he was abused. “He would come home and start every night. It wouldn’t matter if I was asleep or not. He’d start hitting me because he was always on that,” he says, drinking from an imaginary beer can.

“My dad was either at work, the pub, or in his bed and I was left to my own devices. I had the run of a four-bedroom house, feeding myself and everything – I wasn’t getting to school until 12 in the afternoon, I just didn’t care.” Even now, as he speaks, he’s apathetic, as if telling the story causes the same tide of disillusionment to wash over him just as it had 28 years ago.

“I started smoking weed. No one told me to go in. I might not see my old man for a week. I felt like when I went to school, I was going to get a lot of grief – I got singled out a lot. I had no one to guide me. If you’re left to your own devices as a kid you do whatever, have your friends stay all the time and stuff. ”

He found a new school, managing to get maths, English and music GCSEs before trying a number of careers. But when three loved ones, including his nan and two best friends, died in quick succession, Darryl fell on hard times. He’s been on the streets for three years now, but during the Covid-19 lockdown has been refused a room at a hotel due to a mental health condition. “I’ve got a lot of trust issues. When my mum and dad broke up it played on my brain. My nan had always been there for me as my parents worked, but when my mum left, I didn’t see her for two years. I haven’t seen my dad since 2007 and I haven’t seen my mum in years, she’s doing her own thing, you know?”

Darryl’s experience will be familiar to thousands. Across the country, children suffering with unstable home lives or poor mental health frequently miss extended periods of their education, sometimes dropping out entirely. In the academic year of 2018-19, 1.4 per cent of all lessons available at state funded-secondary schools in England were skipped by students who didn’t have permission to be absent. Nationally, that year, names on the register went unanswered 35 million times without explanation.

“Persistent absentees account for more than half of all unauthorised absence, so improving the attendance for these pupils is key,” says Richard Bettsworth, director of public affairs at the Association of School and College Leaders. “Unfortunately, there have been severe cuts to local authority and school funding which make it more difficult to provide the intervention and support necessary to achieve this objective,” he adds.

With some local authorities hit harder than others by these cuts over the past decade, that level of support varies significantly across the country, meaning the prospects for every child facing issues similar to Darryl are increasingly subject to a postcode lottery. “Having staff who can explore the causes of non-attendance and work with families definitely works, but it hasn’t been a concern of recent governments,” explains Susan Hallam, a former professor of education psychology at UCL.

Emily* works in one such support role. As well as running timetabled classes for children needing help with literacy skills, she works one-on-one with secondary school students requiring extra help getting to where they are expected to be with English. The schoolchildren find their way to Emily’s office through a variety of channels, be it referrals from teachers, tests or walk-ins off their own backs.

Throughout the day she will spend time with children of all ages at her school in east London. They are often the most vulnerable members of the student body who need help reaching the required standards of literacy for exams, jobs and adult life. It’s her job to make kids who might have slipped through the net feel their education matters.

She’s 27 now, but when Emily was in the run-up to her GCSEs, she began to feel like going to school was an impossible task. She had always been quiet, but had become increasingly isolated from her classmates, losing more and more confidence as time went on. She didn’t hate school, she just couldn’t go – she felt claustrophobic, trapped – it became like prison.

“I used to look up illnesses on the NHS website and then fake the symptoms. If my parents thought I was ill it meant I didn’t have to go to school,” she says. Years on, when she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, her reluctance to go to school began to make more sense. She says she didn’t really understand how she felt at the time, and only after years of reflection has been able to understand what she was going through.  

Imagine you’re a single mother with financial problems and your mental health isn’t good, getting your child up on time and into school in the morning is quite a low priority. If the child isn’t particularly happy at school and says they don’t want to go, it’s quite hard for the parents to resist that sometimes

In total, almost 18 million school days were missed last year without explanation by English secondary school children but the reasons behind truancy are vast, and the outcomes widespread. Like the lives of the people that form truancy statistics, the factors involved in understanding the issue in its entirety are complex. Ann Peters, deputy head at a Croydon Primary school, is tasked with ensuring improved attendance across all age groups. She says there’s a link between missing school at primary age and challenges later in life. Low attendance is often linked to poor qualifications, she says, and missing more primary school leads to a tendency to play truant at secondary school. Academic work is skipped and if the trend progresses, GCSE results are known to suffer.

Much of Peters’ work involves ensuring children from vulnerable families are afforded the best start to education possible in the hope it might mitigate the chances of these negative outcomes taking hold. The families she works with tend to appear on her radar for a variety of reasons, often only momentarily for issues like their parents being evicted from their homes or more permanently due to ongoing medical reasons.

Somewhat surprisingly, she says the biggest problem she and her colleagues face is the mental health of pupils’ parents. “Imagine you’re a single mother with financial problems and your mental health isn’t good, getting your child up on time and into school in the morning is quite a low priority. If the child isn’t particularly happy at school and says they don’t want to go, it’s quite hard for the parents to resist that sometimes.”

Up and down the country, the rates of unauthorised absences vary dramatically. Many of the local authorities with the highest truancy rates also find themselves with some of the lowest numbers of students reaching academic milestones such as passing both maths and English GCSEs, while those at the top of the attendance hierarchy encounter a greater number of students securing top grades.

Of the 13 local authorities in England with highest rates of unauthorised absences, only two are in the south, while of the 13 with the lowest average truancy rates, only two are in the north. Similarly, of the six schools with the lowest truancy rates in the country, none were further north than Stratford. And the two lowest-performing local authorities for truancy, Middlesbrough and Knowsley, are also one and two for the lowest number of students securing a GCSE in English and maths.

To the east of Liverpool, the metropolitan borough of Knowsley makes up a long stretch of land that saw significant population decline on the back of shrinking industrial work opportunities. In the 2018-19 academic year, it had a truancy rate of 3.9 per cent, almost three times the national average, while only 41 per cent of GCSE takers obtained grade 4 (a pass) in maths and English – the lowest rate in England.

At the other end of the scale sits Sutton, a leafy London suburb on the southern border of the capital. It has one of the lowest crime rates in London and is known for having excellent schools. Sutton has the fifth-lowest truancy rate of any local authority in England, and the second-highest number of GCSE-age students obtaining maths and English qualifications.

However, being from an affluent area doesn’t guarantee a smooth education. When Alex Hancox, 23, was at a Sutton grammar school he found life difficult, and over time his mental health struggles led to him dropping out. These days he manages a hobby store in Bermondsey that he describes as “nerd heaven” and in 2018 was crowned world champion of the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game in London – a game that has seen him flown to Tokyo and LA by the competition organisers for the annual championships.

18 million

secondary school days were missed last year

In year 10, Hancox began to feel isolated and his mental health began to deteriorate. “There came a point where I couldn’t even wake up in the morning,” he says. “Sometimes my sleep was dreadful – in a particularly bad period I would be sleeping between 14 and 18 hours a day without doing any kind of exercise. Around that time, things at school became too much. I wasn’t able to cope with the workload and it spiralled from there – it became too difficult to be present.”

Unable to face going to school, Hancox missed a large portion of year 10. After a period of impromptu homeschooling, he eventually managed to go back but only a few months later dropped out completely. After time away from education he went to a local sixth form college to complete a business diploma and a remedial English GCSE but has no further formal qualifications.

Fortunately for Hancox, his family were supportive and staff at his school kept tabs on how he was; no one encouraged him to skip school and he was checked up on often. He says he just didn’t want to go, and he couldn’t cope with the prospect of having to – “it was just me and the system” – so he left. 

Speaking now, he says he loves what he does. That he is happy.

Hancox’s experience serves as a reminder that young people living in relatively prosperous areas are by no means invulnerable to a damaged education – that it can happen no matter where they live. But, when Hancox was struggling to get to school, a strong support network was crucial for him to move forward. Sufficient help isn’t available to everyone who falls out with the education system, and his story is a stark contrast to that of Darryl.

Katherine Shelly, 20, founder of the People Project, an Instagram series that focuses on trying to break down the stigma of homelessness, says many of the people she speaks to end up on the streets because of poor or non-existent help networks. “There are people who have come from the care system,” she says. “But when they get out there is no one to support them, they have little family to fall back on. Most people get help from family, but if you don’t have that support system there’s nothing for you.”

The impacts of budget cuts nationwide have been asymmetrical, with some areas more affected than others. “It would be very interesting to look at schools with very high levels of attendance compared to those without and look at what pastoral support is in place,” says Will Shield, an academic at the University of Exeter and an educational psychologist.

“I basically try to understand anything that stops a child from learning,” he says. “It’s important to think about the language used; if we use the word truancy it comes across like the child has ownership of what they’re doing. If we use terms like school refusal or school avoidance, it helps explains why children are missing days.

“Preventative services that used to be funded by local authorities have been reduced from budget cuts over the last few years, so services that used to be in place for social care and education like specialist teachers for behaviour, family support workers and people who work in the community have been removed – and when they were got rid of we began to see increased exclusions from school, increased behavioural issues and increased conversations to do with mental health.

“What psychologists have found,” he says, “is it’s very easy to talk about mental health as being within a child, like it’s that child’s medical problem. But what we know about anxiety and reluctance to go to school is that it often isn’t the child’s problem to sort out, but rather a systemic problem within the school. To tackle that you need extra people and extra resources, people who understand the system and community they are living in, but often those social services don’t exist anymore. Fortunately, what we are seeing is more of a conversation taking place in government about these issues again.”

And again, the postcode lottery comes into play. While some of the most deprived areas have been targeted for additional funding, it hasn’t touched all areas in need. Shield explains that in 2016 the government introduced “opportunity areas” funding, focusing on parts of the country with the highest areas of deprivation in the hope of improving social mobility there. However, while these areas are to receive funding or what prime minister Boris Johnson calls “levelling up”, other areas will continue to be neglected.

Laurence Guinness has been the chief executive of The Childhood Trust for almost four years. In late June, they launched a major report to better understand the extent of trauma inflicted on disadvantaged children by Covid-19.

“When we look at one of the biggest causes of children not going to school, it is because they have been excluded. There’s a strong correlation between exclusions and socioeconomic status. One follows the other. If a child consistently fails to turn up at school, social services might become involved but then many kids are simply excluded, by virtue of the fact that they are difficult and a lot of schools don’t want kids like that on their rosters because it can affect exam results.”

We believe that this pandemic, in terms of the mental health impact, is creating conditions that will render some children ‘unfit for learning’ by the time they go back

Guinness talks quickly, with a clipped home counties tone. “The attendance of school isn’t just about education. The majority of what people learn at school is how to be great human beings and how to make friends, how to relate to their peers and have their psychological needs met – they learn how to form relationships and how to play; they learn how to be a great adult. A lot of disadvantaged children suffer from anxiety and a lack of confidence. Their lives are tough, and they often know they don’t have some of the things that other kids have.

“Children miss school because there are complex social problems in their households, often because they are lacking support at home. It’s fair to say children from single-parent households are more likely to miss school.

“I’ve been told by charity partners about the impacts later on in life from missing school. Things like depression, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, psychosis and admissions to psychiatric hospitals through the use of substance misuse.”

Like Darryl and much of what Guinness speaks of, Jeremy, 33, has lived. He had been attending Darland High School near Liverpool in the 1980s until he was expelled shortly before his GCSEs aged 15 because of poor attendance. “It’s a catch-22 sort of thing,” he jokes, sitting against a broadband maintenance box on the pavement near Charing Cross. “I never had a father figure growing up, and no one told me to go to school. I was quite unruly and started hanging about with the wrong crowd. I started playing with the idea of not going in and began missing more and more school. Before I knew it, I wasn’t going in at all.”

Eventually he got a call saying don’t come back, and, after a few jobs found himself living on the streets aged 23. “I grew up in an alright town, it was middle-class, I just wasn’t interested in school, I think that call is still the best news I ever had.”

As they tell their stories, both Jeremy and Darryl seem to rue what Guinness has identified – they were kids left alone, without support networks, or parents keeping them at school. Of the communities living on London’s streets, one thing so many have in common is a disrupted education. What did you get kicked out for? “Fighting,” says Kevin outside Sainsbury’s on the Strand, before he’s whisked away by his friend who’s got hold of some change. “Sorry mate, I’ve got to go.”

Part of Guinness’ work involves frontline interaction with vulnerable children. He tells the story of 11-year-old Thomas* from southwest London. Thomas learned to read just three years ago and only achieved literacy due to intensive mentoring, similar to the help Emily provides to children at her school. His mother is an alcoholic and occasional drug user and prior to the pandemic Thomas would occasionally miss school because she wouldn’t get up in time, leaving him to lie around the house, often hungry as there was rarely food in. School provided structure to his life. “It was a lifeline. He benefitted from getting food each day, and his teachers were worried about him,” Guinness says.

During the outbreak, Thomas has benefitted from projects delivering food to his home, but help can’t be there all the time and his case has been referred to social workers. Most concerning is that Thomas is only one of thousands in this position and as life returns to normal a backlog is predicted. One organisation funded by The Childhood Trust, School Home Support, has purportedly had a 750 per cent increase in referrals to social services compared to this time last year.

The Childhood Trust has found that the impacts of coronavirus are likely only to widen the gorge between wealthy and poor children. “Children that are disadvantaged tended to perform much worse in their GCSEs even before lockdown,” Guinness says. “But now this gap is getting even wider. We’ve found middle-class children are over twice as likely to participate in online lessons since lockdown, compared to only 16 per cent of children in working-class backgrounds participating. During this pandemic some children have fallen way, way behind. We are seeing a sort of digital apartheid as kids who don’t have digital access have been abandoned by the education system.

“We don’t have concrete data yet but believe some children will have fallen so far behind it will be like missing a whole year of school – we don’t fully know the extent of the damage yet.” Guinness worries that while more privileged kids have been managed by parents with lessons, exercise, structure and even tutoring, disadvantaged children will miss out entirely.

“There is something called educational learning loss that happens over normal summer holidays where through a lack of stimulation, exercise and good nutrition, a heightened sense of anxiety and abandonment, children can be put back three and half months in terms of their literacy skills. We believe that this pandemic, in terms of the mental health impact, is creating conditions that will render some children “unfit for learning” by the time they go back because they will be dealing with trauma and fear of being locked down.

“The mental health burden on London’s 88,000 children in temporary accommodation during lockdown will be huge. Children already finding things difficult who are now hearing that if you go outside you will die have taken this messaging to heart. Some children thought humanity was going to be wiped out by this. We spoke to about 30 children and almost all of them were disproportionately worried about everything. They often thought that if their parents went out, they wouldn’t be coming back. They thought they’d go out and die – we don’t know the consequences of this.” It is clear in Guinness’ eyes, coronavirus presents the same challenge to children’s educations as not going to school at all.

“For vulnerable children this will create new issues and for those struggling already this will further degrade their resilience and make them more anxious. These are the precursors to serious mental health conditions; to depression, anxiety and PTSD. You couldn’t create something more likely to affect those that are already vulnerable if you tried.”

When all returns to normal, Emily will return to work, helping children like Thomas have the best start in life they can, regardless of disadvantages that have befallen them before they have managed to get off the ground. But the effects of mental health struggles and poor support networks are clear to see. The stories of Jeremy and Darryl are a testament to the importance of work done by people like Emily, and to the severity of the looming disaster if the education system’s response to Covid-19 and the new digital apartheid is hindered by the budget cuts that have blighted it over the past decade.

*Some names have been changed to protect identities ​