Here’s how to really improve school attendance

Action Alliances? Fines? No. It’s time for a change of approach, writes James Moore. Children need more support – particularly those with special educational needs and disabilities

If you really want to improve attendance, then investment is required (PA Media)

Alliteration is a great way of selling things and, hey presto, we may soon have some more of it in the form of “attendance action alliances” made up of schools, local councils and doctors.

Trialling these, according to a report by Schools Week, is the latest idea being floated to improve the persistently high rates of school absence, which surged post-Covid and have barely improved since then.

The Department for Education (DfE) told me the idea was in its “infancy”, so it didn’t have anything to add. But watch this space.

Action! That’s a fine buzzword. Governments like action even more than alliteration. The liberal deployment of the word makes it look like they are busily doing stuff. Grasping nettles. Solving problems.

Attendance was, I understand, going to be a big DfE focus at the start of the school year, until all that crumbling concrete resulted in the enforced absence of a number of kids. Oops.

The parliamentary Education Committee weighed in with a report this week, which highlighted figures from the 2021/22 academic year. They showed an overall absence rate of 7.6 per cent, up from around 4–5 per cent pre-pandemic. Within this, 5.5 per cent of missed sessions were authorised absences, while 2.1 per cent (just under a third) were unauthorised. Big surprise, illness was the main driver.

Unauthorised holiday absences? This is often used as a stick to beat parents who might not be able to afford holidays at all if they didn’t cheat given the egregious price rises imposed during school holidays. But they amounted to just 0.4 per cent. Small beer, then.

Some 22.5 per cent of pupils were persistently absent, which is around double the pre-pandemic rate, and 1.7 per cent of all pupils were severely absent, compared to less than 1 per cent pre-pandemic.

The messaging surrounding this issue, and some of the commentary, hasn’t always been helpful. “We are seeing a huge amount of Friday absence that wasn’t there before. Parents are home on Fridays, you know. I mean, we’ve had evidence from kids as well,” said children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, at an Education Committee hearing earlier this year. She expressed concern about attitudes post-pandemic and described persistent absence as “one of the issues of the age”. That sure made a lot of headlines.

I’m not questioning Dame Rachel’s data. But here’s the problem: the resulting narrative means you could easily be fooled into thinking that if we just got tough on soft-hearted parents letting their kids skip on a Friday, all would be well again.

And it wouldn’t. Another post-pandemic change has been a marked decline in children’s mental health, which is clearly playing a big role here, as the committee recognised in its report.

Action – there’s that word again – to address that has, however, been hard to find. I wonder if it’s partly because we just want to brush the pandemic under the carpet and forget that it ever happened. Lockdowns were miserable. The memory of them is still apt to prompt a shudder and a sigh of relief. Now, can’t we just forget about it all?

Well, no. We can’t, because they were particularly hard on some groups and the long-term impact of them has barely been addressed. One of those groups would be children, who were torn from their routines, prevented from seeing their friends, confined to their homes. They weren’t able to just be children. It was particularly tough on those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and their parents who still face long and exhausting struggles to get any kind of support at all.

Local authorities, think tanks and even government officials peddle false narratives about “pushy middle-class parents” angling for help they don’t need. They lobby the government to tighten up the criteria for education health and care plans. Reports have been circulating that ministers would like to see their number reduced too. The reality is that more is needed, and the dismal, legally questionable decision-making of local authorities needs to be addressed while we’re at it.

Then there are mental health services, which have always been the poor relation when it comes to the NHS. That was something Theresa May actually got right. But precious little has improved since then, especially when it comes to children. This too needs to be addressed.

I’m sorry if this looks like another demand for resources. But if you really want to improve attendance – if it truly is one of the “issues of the age” – then investment is required.

We also need to recognise that some children are not (and will never be) fine in school. Square Peg, which fights for these children and their families, describes the recognition by the committee that SEND and mental health are “driving factors in absence”, and its reference to “stretched services and waiting lists” as “huge”.

“We’ll keep saying Dickensian truancy laws do not work. It was great to see the committee saying they’re harming most vulnerable, especially during cost of living crisis,” the organisation also told me.

Quite so. Perhaps the DfE could set up, I don’t know, some sort of Action Alliance? Alongside the Department of Health and Social Care? And (whisper this) the Treasury? To tackle the issue of investment?

In the meantime, the DfE could do worse than heeding the committee’s urging for national standards on those fines to be put in place to ensure that they really are the last resort. There is wide variation between local authorities, which have considerable discretion in their use.

I question whether they should be used at all. If you have a child with mental health issues, they impose a persistent worry that parents simply don’t need. Dragging those who are hard up before the courts and criminalising them as a result of the failures of local councils and agencies like Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services is one of the more grotesque injustices of the day.