Why can teenagers shop and march, but not go to lessons?
Tanith Carey examines a lost generation of teens and meets their parents – who are despairing...
It’s 9.30am and, as usual, my teenagers aren’t exactly up and ready for any online learning. They are still in bed. Ordinarily, if my Year 10 and Year 13 daughters had been at school, by this time of day they might have had a healthy dose of English, History or Music. But with Lily’s A-levels now called off, a question mark over whether Clio’s GSCES next year will be delayed and an email from their school telling us it’s not likely to open until September, it’s hardly surprising that, like most other teens, they are not exactly keeping school hours though as they go to a music school, they are taking the time to do far more violin practice.
New research, published yesterday shows that a growing number of pupils are staying permanently logged-off. It is estimated up to two million – one in five children – are doing less than an hour of schoolwork a day, according to the UCL Institute of Education. Research has also found that four million pupils had not had regular contact with teachers and that up to six million children had not returned the last assignment set.
In other words, chronic absenteeism is becoming the education crisis of our time – and leaving many parents wondering how this generation will ever catch up.
This absence rate appears to be higher in secondaries where there are more low-income students who can’t access computers or the internet. But this is more nuanced than a divide between poor and better-off children. The divide which is being less talked about is between the children who were motivated and doing well at school, and those who weren’t – and that cuts across all income brackets. And it is these pupils who have been only too happy to take advantage of this delicious opportunity to completely drop out of view.
Well not entirely. Many of them can be seen, just not on an online Zoom class. Instead you will be able to spot them at illegal quarantine raves, or heading for a party in the park with their mates or afternoon at a protest. Tellingly, this week, when secondaries opened for a small number of year 10 and 12s, there was a 400 strong queue outside the Nike Town in Oxford Street with teenage boys among them buying new trainers, rather than diligently doing any school work.
Many have simply opted out of a system which often feels like it has given up on them. As the Government drags its heels over getting Britain’s children back into the classroom, over the last few months, many have worked out how easy it is to evade teachers when little effort is being made to track them down for nonattendance. After all, they now have dozens of credible reasons from the “Sorry, my internet stopped working” to “I got locked out of my Gmail and didn’t get the invite”.
These battles are being played out at home too. After spending our lives telling our teens they can’t have a screen in their bedrooms, our children now have them in there 24/7 with us eavesdropping, hoping for the utter relief of hearing them in a lesson, and not on a video game. Many parents are frantic with worry about their teens, full of pent up aggression from Fortnite or Call of Duty and a lack of sleep. Along with everything else, it seems that Coronavirus has also re-affirmed the lines of teenage rebellion. Because while teens don’t want to see their teachers, they are desperate to see their friends.
Their thirst for the dopamine hit they get when they see their mates means that now they are allowed to see each other in small groups, parents’ battles are now not only over academics but also over their social lives – and how can they maintain social distance at outdoor meet-ups? There are already signs that teens all over the country are determined to make up for lost time with “revenge partying” on a
vast scale. Last weekend alone saw 6,000 youngsters converge on two illegal outdoor “quarantine raves” in Manchester – a foretaste of what could be to come in summer while nightclubs remain closed and festivals are cancelled.
Police forces across England have been struggling to keep up with a rising number of illicit parties in forest, fields and in the street. The number of drug offences police recorded in London during May following the first easing of lockdown was 6,444 – almost double the amount from the same month last year. Some of this is likely to have been accounted for by bored teenagers, hanging out in parks and smoking weed.
Being a mother of teenagers in lockdown has certainly taken its toll for Helena*, a mother of three with sons aged 20 and 13 and a daughter aged 18.
“When my daughter goes out, I know she isn’t socially distanced and she and her friends are drinking and possibly smoking drugs. I don’t want her to go but I can’t physically stop her.
“She should be travelling or working and getting ready for university so I understand her frustration, but the tense atmosphere at home has me tiptoeing around, afraid of her losing her temper, storming off and never coming back.”
Caught in a claustrophobic tinderbox with three teens desperate for freedom, like many parents, Helena wonders what her options are.
“I am not a feeble person but I am struggling to assert any authority; if a teenager refuses to co-operate there is literally nothing you can do apart from confiscate their one link with the outside world; their mobile. Once you’ve done that, they are angry and turn on you even more.
“Without rules even relatively privileged families like mine are descending into deeply unhappy anarchy.”
The challenge for parents is that never in the history of adolescence have the restrictions on teenagers been tighter – precisely at the time in their lives when they are trying to break free.
*Name has been changed