Like most things, schools have never really recovered from the pandemic. Whether it’s student attainment, teachers leaving the profession or the attention span and behaviour of pupils, school life for many is harder than it has ever been. But absence is one area of particular and growing concern, as schools up and down the country attempt to reach the so-called ghost children: the thousands who never returned to the classroom after lockdown.
The worries about student absence that we teachers share with each other were confirmed this week by an alarming new report. It reveals that on an average day this year, one in 10 GCSE pupils in England have been absent from school – a rise of 70% since before the pandemic. According to the investigation, one in 20 year 11 students have missed at least half of their classes this year and around one in 100 are only attending school on an authorised part-time basis.
There will be those who deliberately misconstrue these facts as evidence of a wave of wokeness spreading across schools, allowing children to go part-time owing to nothing but run-of-the-mill teenage mood swings. But spend even a day as a teacher (particularly in a state school in a deprived area where underfunding and poverty compound every issue) and you’ll see the truth: the causes of this national absence problem are complicated, ranging from declining mental health to the cost of living crisis, government policy and societal shifts.
On the one hand, we have the undeniable fact that our world has changed since the pandemic began. Hybrid and home working are here to stay. In fact, a third of UK workers report that they would quit a job if asked to return to the office full-time. But if we can accept that the convenience, comfort and safety of being able to work from home is a legitimate lifestyle choice for adults, why are we so unable to acknowledge that the same might be true of teenagers who are navigating the extra challenges of puberty and growing up in an increasingly complex world?
Admittedly, I wouldn’t advocate for full-time remote schooling for most children in the UK. Enough parents have flashbacks of trying to home-school children through lockdowns, and children need the social development of interacting with peers. But for some young people – those with sensitive mental health needs, those dealing with particularly challenging life circumstances or those who are neurodiverse and may thrive in the familiarity and routine of home – the pandemic offered an alternative vision of how their life could look, and then we whipped it from under their feet.
