We must get serious about school absence

“Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick [the] road clean with tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing-cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at that mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home… our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.” — The Four Yorkshiremen, Monty Python

Whenever I discuss school absence with anyone born before 1985, I get roughly the response above.

Although entertaining, such reflections tend to be a little lacking in rigour and insight.  However, in this case, they are quite right. Back in the good old days, parents sent their children to school,  come what may, because they knew what was good for them. We have, in fact, gone soft. 

It’s been a gradual process — I am but 24 and undoubtedly got gentler treatment than my oldest brother, five school years up from me. If I moaned enough as a child, I would occasionally get a day at home. The best he would get was “if you really don’t feel well, you can come home at lunch”. 

He was never going to come home at lunch — what a humiliation. 

What was once a basic bare minimum of a parent’s authority is quickly becoming a hill too steep to climb

This all frames a serious point. We are robbing children across the country of the joy of friendships, the thrill of genuine learning, and the fire of ambition by failing to enforce the loving scaffolding they need to achieve. 

What was once a basic bare minimum of a parent’s authority is quickly becoming a hill too steep to climb. Twenty per cent of schoolchildren in the 2023/24 academic year were “persistently absent” — missing over a tenth of days — some 1.5 million children. It is worse as children go through school, with over a quarter of secondary school children missing that amount.

One might think attendance is not that important an education issue, or that ten per cent really isn’t that much school to miss — indeed, polling in new CSJ research reveals almost half of parents think nine in ten days is “reasonable attendance” — but outcomes tell quite a different story. 

Pupils who attend at least 95 per cent of the time have three times the chances of Grade 5s in GCSE English and Maths than those who attend 85 to 90 per cent of the time — the very best attenders of the persistently absent crew. Persistently absent pupils are also three times as likely to become young offenders and six times as likely to become NEET (not in education, employment, or training) as other pupils. They earn £10,000 less at age 28 than their well-attending counterparts.

Alongside the rise in lax attendance has been spiralling rates of severe absence — children who miss over half of school. While the rise in the number of children missing 5 to 30 per cent of days is reverting, the number that are chronically not attending school continues to spiral.

The chunk missing over 30 per cent of days has grown and grown. Severe absence has more than trebled since before the pandemic and is nearly five times what it was a decade ago. Those missing at least 30 per cent was 1.3 per cent a decade ago and is now 4.4 per cent. It was rising long before the pandemic, had the same pandemic spike, and has continued to grow since. 

A new report from the CSJ, Absent Ambition, published on Sunday, looks to resolve the root causes of why this has happened, and how we can reverse this. 

The research found that, fundamentally, this is about what is going on at home. Parents have to be held responsible when children aren’t up to the basic standard when they start Reception, and Kindred Squared research shows us that a third are not. Early years home learning is also trending down: fewer parents read, learn poems, sing, learn numbers, and count with their children than did in 2017. The average time parents spend reading with their children each week globally is 6.7 hours, compared to our lousy 3.6 hours.

A lot of this is striving parents left isolated and overstretched. Half of children are growing up without a father figure at home, with 29 per cent of lone parent households being long-term workless, compared with just 2.3 per cent of couple parent households. Those living with neither biological parent have three times the persistent absence rate of those with both.

Language barriers undoubtedly play a part — we have reached a point where a stunning 23 per cent of primary school children and over three in ten nursery children do not speak English as their first language in this country. 

Of course, it is harder to measure”‘going soft”, but we do know parents, on the whole, value school and respect teachers less. Alongside almost half of parents thinking missing one day each fortnight is fine, polling from Parentkind found that 57 per cent of parents agreed that they would take their child on a term time holiday. 

Similarly, we see over 80 per cent of teachers dealing with parents unhappy about sanctions, unsupportive of attendance, and unhappy with school rules. 

Absent Ambition outlines one key solution to fix this: attendance awareness courses. Modelled on national speed awareness courses for drivers, an attendance awareness course would directly address the main issue causing absence: indifference. Currently, parents of truanting children get fined —half a million fines were issued last year. These work principally as a deterrent, and, to a lesser degree, as a punishment. More accurately, the system does not work.

An attendance awareness course would directly target parental understanding of the importance of attendance. It would match the solution to the problem. It is also scalable and prudent. You can cover much of the cost by increasing the fines on no-shows, and whilst most intensive support — like parenting contracts or attendance mentors — only reach a few thousand children, we know the attendance awareness course could reach hundreds of thousands because over a million a year take the speed awareness course.

And in terms of who would run it, well, my oldest brother would probably offer, fuelled on the resentment of his younger siblings getting away with bunking off school every now and then when he never could. He’s not that scalable, but there are plenty like him who would do the honours. 

The CSJ does not pull punches in Absent Ambition, not because these situations are not difficult, but because this is too important. We owe it to the future of children across this country to give them the opportunity to thrive. We need to get our absent children back in school.