How do you solve a problem like truancy? Lockdowns and school closures may be a distant memory but far too many children are still not regularly attending school. One in five pupils is reported to be ‘persistently’ absent from the classroom, a figure which has barely budged since schools fully reopened in March 2021. It’s up from around one in 10 who persistently missed school before the Covid pandemic. What’s more, the attendance gap between poorer children and their better-off peers is widening.
New polling from the Centre for Social Justice suggests more than one in four parents think Covid has shown it is not essential for children to attend school every day. The think tank argues that the contract between parents and schools has been broken. It is hard to disagree. However, diagnosing a problem is one thing, solving it is quite another. This week both Labour and Conservatives have set out their plans to tackle absenteeism.
Without this focus on education, we are left with a bizarre push for attendance as an end in itself
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan kicked off by announcing 18 new ‘attendance hubs’ intended to ‘enable schools with strong attendance practice to share their approaches’ with similar schools.
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