Tim Sanders & Warwick Mansell

Schools cracking the whip over Covid absences

Warwick Mansell is a freelance education journalist and founder/writer of educationuncovered. co.uk

DOES England’s education system get the balance right between pressure and support?

Sadly, I have long believed the answer is “no”, with national ambitions which few would object to – such as the need for all pupils to do well at school, and achievement gaps to close – bleeding into stress on both children and adults that is counterproductive.

Personal experience of this came our way recently, on receipt of a letter from our children’s primary school about their attendance. Both had missed two or three days for genuine sickness, in three months, with one child also missing another six days due to Covid.

Yet the letter did not mention Covid. It seemed not to take into account that coronavirus had caused some of the absence. Instead, it quoted attendance rates which were below average and informed us that court action and a penalty notice could be triggered if “attendance continues to drop”.

This was a shock, from a school that in the past has provided great levels of support, and where kindness is rightly emphasised. The letter had the feeling of having been automatically generated, yet it brought up questions as to what pressures were on the school that it had been produced without any contextual communication with us, and why potential punishments had been mentioned so quickly.

What would be the impact on parents who are really struggling, we wondered? How are families meant to cope if anxiety created by the schooling experience is fuelling absences? Will punishment help?

It seems, after I tweeted a question about whether this was occurring in other schools, that this letter, while not the norm, was not that unusual, either. Sadly, it was also clear that this is very much the mild end of less-than-positive experiences some people have had.

Several Twitter responders wrote of having been interviewed by police under caution “for non-attendance during the pandemic”. One parent wrote of being “threatened with three months in jail” after deciding not to send her daughter into school, which she said was not “safe” because of Covid. Stories have emerged throughout the pandemic of children being under pressure to attend school despite family members being clinically vulnerable.

I hear of these experiences and think, along with many others, that education in England needs a reset following the strain of the last two years. Or should we just hope to return to ‘normal’?

This seems to be the Government’s hope, with Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi having written to head teachers last November warning them of the importance of improving attendance and that they should “make full use of enforcement actions where appropriate”.

Of course attendance is important. But, as an NEU survey found last year, so is a nurturing approach to the recovery, with nearly two thirds of respondents believing mental health was a low priority for the Government.

Surely we need to consider all of the pressures on children and their families, before we start routinely adding to them?