A proverb proven by the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, this week, when she kicked off the new school year (and Parliament’s return) by lobbing out a few half-truths and unexploded blame bombs about absence – the crisis still dominating our schools.
It read like she’d plugged Keir Starmer’s hardline boasts of a “nationwide crackdown on illegal working” into ChatGPT with the prompt “this but unruly students” – before uploading Reform UK’s education manifesto and requesting just a sprinkle of lazy assumptions about both parents and pupils.
Confused? Welcome to the hot-button issue of school attendance, a world in which ministers regularly perform mental gymnastics to shift responsibility and obfuscate the truth.
The three major drivers of school absence are illness (rocket-charged by Covid and a child mental health explosion); growing numbers of kids with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) who cannot function within a traditional school environment or are met with dwindling support; and child poverty – now at a record-high with 4.5 million kids (9 out of a classroom of 30) living below the poverty line.
So, while Phillipson’s impassioned rhetoric in support of white working-class kids was heard loud and clear, it’s outrageous that she didn’t choose to raise her voice for the 59,000 kids with Long Covid, 70 per cent of whom have reported an impact on their education. Or, the 18 per cent of 7-16-year-olds that the NHS say have a “probable mental disorder”. Or, the kids with SEND – those with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) are a whopping seven times more likely to be absent.
square ALISON PHILLIPS Pointing out Angela Rayner is working class is not the compliment you think it is
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They’re not so keen on the ‘p’ word, though, our politicians. For class is something to be proud of, while child poverty – a public health crisis that’s both preventable and a political choice – shames our country and more specifically, our leaders.
And it’s this Labour Government that has actually ramped up the criminalisation of school absence, increasing fines for the first time since 2012 and levying them against kids with SEND and those in our most deprived areas.
This week, the Archbishop of York recounted that kids in a local school take in empty lunch boxes, fill them up from the foodbank and take them home for tea. I, too, have seen what he has – and worse.
It is getting better, though, claims the Education Secretary, pointing to the latest figures which show that the levels of persistently absent pupils (missing at least 10 per cent of school) fell from 19 per cent in 2023/24 to 18 per cent in autumn 2024/25 (though that’s still a mind-melting 1.28 million kids). Before speaking of a bright future with breakfast clubs, expansion of FSM and vague plans for “better” SEND and mental health support.
Think tank The Centre for Social Justice, who’ve tracked attendance since 2021, now say absence in our schools is “entrenched”. Even going so far as to issue an extraordinary warning: if current absence rates are not addressed, we could see half a million pupils fail their GCSEs in the next five years.
Kids who were just starting secondary school when this crisis reared its head are now in their final GCSE year, having lost God only knows what in the way of opportunities and life chances. We cannot let the same fate await those starting their education this week.
Terri White is a social affairs and culture journalist, author and documentarian living in the north-west of England
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