The reasons why young people don’t go to school are many and complex. However, one indisputable fact is that, since the pandemic ended, a great many more young people haven’t been attending school. The figures across the UK are fairly uniform, at least in state schools, and they show that the rate of non-attendance has more or less doubled from about 4 or 5 per cent to 8 or 10 per cent.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Most children continue to go more or less every day, and some are chronic non-attenders. Some don’t attend for weeks on end, or not at all, and some attend frequently but only for parts of days, or don’t ever come in on a Friday. It’s an area of real concern to teachers and parents and, no matter how difficult it will prove to be, something needs to be done.
I was going to say “… because if you don’t go to school, you can’t learn” but that, fairly obviously, isn’t true. Some young people never go to school because their parents choose to educate them at home and many of them do fine, at least academically. During the pandemic, when the online offer from schools was, completely understandably, vastly erratic, some middle-class school students actually had a very enriched curriculum with their professorial mums and artist dads.
And if you’re clever enough, you can get by through self-study. I spoke to somebody on a train recently who claimed that in his final year at school (which was entirely post-pandemic) he attended for 23 per cent of the time, but managed 3 As at Advanced Higher. He was, of course, 17 at that time, so absolutely nothing was done about it.
