Why is it so hard to keep kids in the classroom?
Battle of Ideas festival speaker Dave Clements gets to grips with absent pupils and school exclusions.
In our latest preview for the Battle of Ideas festival in London this coming weekend, writer and school governor Dave Clements examines the rising toll of school absences and suggests that the government should talk to parents and teachers before launching yet another doomed initiative to boost attendance. Dave is speaking at the session SCHOOLS: THE GREAT EXCLUSION DEBATE on Sunday.
There are still tickets available for the festival. Visit the tickets page for more information. Free subscribers to this Substack can get 10% off by using promo code SUBSTACK-BOIF23. Paid subscribers can get even bigger discounts by using our Associate rates.
Too often, debates about schooling have little, if anything, to do with education itself. Whether it is schools supporting youngsters’ so-called ‘social transitioning’, the reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) scandal that closed some schools before they could open this term, or - shockingly - children being murdered on the way to school. Teaching children about the world and passing on the accumulated knowledge of generations past just doesn’t seem to come up.
And yet, I too have found myself getting more concerned about the business of just keeping young people in the classroom. After all, they can’t learn if they’re not there. And parents can only wonder, and worry about, what they get up to if they’re not at home either.
On the first day back this term, 95% of children at mainstream state schools did indeed turn up; though it was, worryingly, a little less (at 89%) for those attending special schools. But how will the rest of the term go? Over the autumn and spring terms of the 2022/23 school year, over a fifth (21.2%) of pupils were recorded as persistently absent. This means they missed at least one in 10 of their lessons. While half of these absences were apparently ‘driven by illness’, you don’t have to be cynic to wonder how ill these young people really were or what the other half of absences were driven by.
If we’re going to answer that question, a recent report, Persistent absence for unauthorised other reasons (or PAUO), published by the Department for Education (DfE), is a good place to start. Before the pandemic, overall absence rates in secondary schools were falling and were less than 5% by 2018/19. These more positive figures were a consequence of a fall in authorised absences - with persistent absences falling by nearly half between 2006/7 and 2013/14 to under 11%. It wasn’t until the pandemic (or rather, lockdown and school closures) in 2019/20 that this began to change, according to the authors of the report.
However, they point out, unauthorised absences were already starting to creep slowly up from 1.1% in 2015/16 to 1.4% in 2018/19 – that is, long before Covid - largely because PAUOs had gone up from 1.7% to 2.2% over the same period. Despite being small in number, these kinds of absences disproportionately account for the overall upward trend in school absences. Harriet Sergeant, writing for The Spectator, while heaping all the blame for these ‘ghost children’ haunting the nation’s schools on lockdown, does take us a little further in understanding what might be going on.
Sergeant explains that the quality of support from schools over the period was also a determinant of whether children would return once the restrictions were finally lifted. Not to mention that the ‘complete absence of statutory services over the pandemic took its toll’ on families, too, and how ‘every mother I spoke to described how the isolation had worn them down and damaged their ability to parent’. One school counsellor she spoke with described children either so ‘crippled by anxiety or depression that they cannot leave the house, or they are angry and bitter, out on the streets and into crime and gangs’.
The government has a plan. Or rather it has an attendance strategy, and has launched a number of initiatives to reduce school absence and improve attendance. It has revised its guidance to schools, created a dashboard of the latest data to support schools, and established an Attendance Action Alliance. Attendance Hubs and Attendance Mentors are to be rolled-out, and ‘effective practice and practical resources’ shared. For instance, parents will be sent automatic text messages - presumably telling them to get their young person into school or else. Despite this activity, DfE’s recent call for evidence suggests it is still groping around for answers as to why this is happening.
What of those that did turn up to school? How many stayed long enough to learn something? In the 2021/22 academic year, there were 6,500 permanent exclusions and 578,300 suspensions (also known as fixed-term exclusions). In nearly half of cases, the reasons given for both was ‘permanent disruptive behaviour’. I’ve written about the alarming numbers of children not going to school and the shocking disparities in those excluded on this website and elsewhere. So I won’t go into it further now. But suffice to say, schools and parents really do seem to be struggling more than ever to engage young people in the project of being educated.
The National Behaviour Survey (NBS) takes a snapshot of the academic year 2021/22. While school leaders and teachers agree that their school rules are at least sometimes applied fairly, only 42% of leaders and 23% of teachers think this happens all the time. More leaders (79%) than teachers (65%) describe parents as supportive of school rules. Ninety-two per cent of leaders describe their school as calm and orderly most if not all of the time, compared with 70% of teachers and 55% of pupils; and 90%, 64% and 47% of these same respondents describe behaviour at their school as good or very good.
All of which suggests those in charge have a rather different view of behaviour issues in their schools than the teachers, parents and children who experience it close up. More than a quarter (29%) of teachers say they don’t get the support they need managing persistently disruptive behaviour. Indeed, schools themselves are as likely to outsource behaviour management to specialist services (92%) as arrange their own targeted interventions, followed by involving specialised pastoral support staff (79%) or suspending or excluding children altogether (77%).
I wonder if there is a lack of engagement all round, with those making the decisions just not acquainted with the issues involved in poor behaviour. Whatever those issues are, when it comes to the impact it has on the learning experience, there is something of a consensus. Sixty-two per cent of leaders and 67% of pupils say they had been affected by classroom disruptions over the past week; and 69% of teachers report losing between one and ten minutes for every half hour of lesson time as a consequence.
There is a remarkable lack of curiosity amongst policy makers as to why this is happening. Why isn’t this child coming in? Why are they behaving like that? What purpose does that exclusion serve? While we can identify contributory factors, there are no easy answers and there isn’t going to be one answer for all disengaged children. But we can be sure that proposing solutions and coming up with initiative after initiative, without first seriously grappling with these kinds of questions, can only fail.
Teachers, teaching assistants, parents and others directly involved in raising, socialising and educating children, are best placed to share their experience, and come up with answers and help policymakers, schools and families find solutions. The most important thing for schools is to return to first principles. It is only by putting aside the distractions and focusing on education, and the importance of filling young minds with real learning, that we are going to get these young people interested and back behind their desks.