To mangle a truth of 2025: utter tosh will travel halfway around the country while the facts are still pulling on their PE knickers.
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.
“Parents need to double down” she told the BBC of her belief that they “need to do more” to get their kids into school (tick, tick…), before slamming a “system” that’s “failed [the] white working-class pupils” she claims are most likely to be hit by absence and suspension (tick tick tick…) and finishing off with Government plans to “crack down on bad behaviour and boost attendance”. Tick, tick, tick, tick boom!
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.
“I will not shy away from telling the truth,” Phillipson proclaimed – even as she conflated both kids who are suspended and those kicking off in classrooms with those missing from them, often for painful reasons. All while, you know, blaming parents, and scapegoating the very same kids she was also claiming were victims.
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.
So, let me clear a few things up. One in five kids in England aren’t absent due to “bad behaviour” or “truancy” or because their parents just can’t be arsed to parent. And while the real issues are complex, the truth is very simple.
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.
I’ve spent the past four years covering absence in schools and this was the simple truth back in 2021, when I first took note of the alarm sounded by then-Chair of the Education Select Committee (and Tory MP) Robert Halfon. He’d clocked that 93,500 pupils had largely disappeared from the classroom post Covid – and even as that number has climbed and climbed, the truth of those three drivers remains.
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.
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And that working-class clarion call isn’t quite what it seems, either. For while yes, free school meals (FSM) kids are just shy of four times more likely to be absent, given a kid is currently only eligible for FSM if their family’s income falls way below the poverty line, Bridget Phillipson doesn’t actually mean “working-class kids”, but “kids in poverty” (there’s that pesky conflation, again!).
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.
She may believe “these children were failed by the previous government” – and I don’t disagree with her – but what about this one? The first Labour Government to oversee a rise in child poverty, after all. The same one that has delayed the “urgent” child poverty strategy twice in the last 15 months. That has so far refused to lift the two-child limit, which – as the single biggest driver of child poverty, according to the Child Poverty Action Group – pushes 109 kids into it, every single day.
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.
Given this bleak landscape our kids are attempting to navigate, is it any wonder that the impact of long-term physical and mental ill-health, unmet special educational needs and brutalising deprivation has had a catastrophic impact inside our classrooms?
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.
I’ve spoken to a mum who became suicidal while begging for support for her neurodiverse daughter, who couldn’t leave the house. Another who was put in temporary accommodation with her kids – miles away from school, without money for the bus fare. A teacher who had to provide a pupil with a duvet and a pillow. A student with no shoes, after he’d walked them off his feet. A teenager caring for their chronically ill mum. A dad, driven to the edge after two years fighting for the alternative provision his son desperately needs.
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.
But what she’s strategically ignoring is that those same figures also show an increase in the worst absence category – severe absence – which just hit a new record for an autumn term. In 2024/25, 148,000 kids were out of school more than they were in, up from 142,000 the previous autumn.
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.
And if that doesn’t have every alarm screaming, flashing and ringing, how about the news that the only students to see worsening absence levels across both persistent and severe absence in the latest figures were those in Reception and Year One. Our four, five and six-year-olds. Is there a more stark reminder of what is at stake for our children?
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.
So yeah, it’s way past time for the Education Secretary to get a grip on school absence – but solutions can only be found when we accurately, truthfully, name and face the causes. Otherwise, I suggest we raise our voices to ask just one question of our Government: exactly how many generations of kids are you happy to lose to this crisis?
Terri White is a social affairs and culture journalist, author and documentarian living in the north-west of England
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