The education issues needing urgent attention

A third of 15-year-olds have been “persistently” missing from schools.

It paints a worrying picture of the approach of some pupils and parents and how powerless head teachers appear to be. And with absence rates at their highest among children in Years 10 and 11 – it’s not just attendance scores which are likely to be downgraded as they hurtle towards GCSES and A-levels.

Officials have got to get to the root cause and then throw everything at fixing it before it becomes endemic.

Anecdotal accounts suggest families, who contended withenforced absences during the pandemic, are more relaxed about time away from the classroom now. Education should indeed be paramount. But the sad truth is teenagers have lived through a time when their learning wasn’t deemed as important as protecting the most vulnerable. We sent hundreds of thousands of children home and left them to get on with it for a very long time. Yes, there was online learning. Yes, teachers did their level best to keep in touch remotely. But for more than a year we gave children the impression their learning needed to take a back seat. This comes on top of the fallout from temporarily switching to a predicted grades system, which only served to widen inequalities. Some might say if pupils don’t show up that’s their look out. More fool them. This isn’t going to be as simple as punishing teens in order to get them back to school, fining parents or woolly incentives for those who make the 9am registration call. It’s far more complex. We’re now talking about shifted attitudes to learning.

If children, who were just months into their formative secondary school years when the pandemic started, have now developed a casual attitude to learning for many reasons then I can’t help but think society is partly to blame. And we now owe it to them to fix it.

‘As a country we sent hundreds of thousands of children home to learn alone behind closed doors, regardless of whether they had the equipment...’