The Chief Inspector of the schools’ watchdog Ofsted, Sir Martyn Oliver, has said he thinks the change in working habits that came about after the Covid pandemic is substantially to blame for the skyrocketing rates of children being absent from school. In 2018-19, persistent absence of pupils from state secondaries ran at about 13 per cent. The most recent figures put it at one child in four.
It’s not just a culture of skiving off we’re looking at here
Sir Martyn told the Sunday Times that, as he sees it:
Suddenly people were used to working from home and, in many cases, I don’t think there was that same desire to have their child in school whilst they were at home. They had been used to it for the best part of a year and a half, on and off, during lockdown. That changed something. If my mum and dad were at home all day, would I want to get up and leave the house, knowing that they were both there? I would be tempted to perhaps say, ‘Can I not stay with you?’
He went on to reminisce about the character-building effects on him of seeing his potato-merchant father leave early for work every day:
There’s an expectation: put your shoes on, put your school uniform on and go out the door and go to school, go to work […] I think developing good social habits of getting up in the morning, putting your shoes on instead of your slippers, going out to work, going to school, expecting to complete a full day’s school, a full day’s work, clearly that’s habit-forming.
His suggestion, then, is that a significant influence on the prevalence of absenteeism is kids catching sight of mum or dad, in an egg-stained dressing gown, settling down to a day’s work at the kitchen table and thinking: ‘If they can WFH, why the hell can’t I?’ That suggestion may be catnip to people who like to think (as people have since the Sunday Times appeared in cuneiform) that kids these days just need a bit of discipline – but it’s wholly unevidenced.
With all respect to Sir Martyn I think his diagnosis is not just speculative but callow; a diagnosis more interested in shaming parents who work from home than in understanding what’s going on with the kids. It also – and I’m surprised to find this from a professional in education – undersells the seriousness of the situation. It’s not just a culture of skiving off we’re looking at here.
As a parent of school-age children, I have lost count of the number of people I know whose children refuse school or otherwise exhibit signs of being very much not okay. Not one of them dodges school for the reasons given, still less is encouraged to tacitly or otherwise by his or her parents’ example. Anyone who has tried to access NHS mental health resources for children and adolescents knows how profoundly overwhelmed those services now are.
The jury remains out on what has caused the epidemic of psychological difficulties that blight today’s adolescents. The pandemic may well have something to do with it; though not in so straightforward a way as Sir Martyn suggests. It certainly can’t have helped that just as they were cresting the beginning of secondary school, children of my daughter’s generation found themselves confined to quarters for the best part of a year and a half, didn’t socialise properly at that crucial age and will, in some sense, have been aware that this disturbing weirdness that came over the world was associated with many millions of people dying. And a year and a half is a long, long time when you’re ten.
Other factors are plausibly suggested, too. Screen addiction is probably in there somewhere. Our children live, as no previous generation has, half in and half out of a digital world in which you are surveilled, judged and rated constantly and in real time. There, you can be bullied by people you’ve never met, and in it you find an intense and vicious simulacrum of real human interaction with none of the genuine connection of the real thing.
I don’t doubt, further, that this generation has absorbed through its skin, even before it’s old enough to articulate it or weigh the evidence, that the world in which it is growing up is immeasurably less stable, welcoming and safe than that in which its parents came of age. They know that they will be poorer, that if they go to university they will emerge groaning with debt and with no certainty of a job and still less certainty of a home; they know that the world is being swept with small war on the heels of small war. They know – and have perhaps indeed been told too forcefully and bluntly – that the world itself is burning. (It probably doesn’t help, either, that there’s a neverending supply of attention-seeking boomer loudmouths to tell them that they’re snowflakes who’d benefit from a good war, and that this climate-change stuff is woke nonsense.)
So the kids, to put it no more forcefully than this, are troubled. And who can blame them? One part of their generation’s smorgasbord of craziness – which includes but is not confined to depression, anxiety, self-harm, disordered eating and pornsickness – is what’s called in the trade ’emotionally based school refusal’.
Parents of my generation compare notes about it, simply agog. When we were growing up, it was completely unthinkable that not going to school was even an option. It just didn’t occur to us that you could say no. We knew, at least in the abstract, about truancy – we’d read stories in which pluckier children than us would bunk off school to scrump apples, or solve a crime, or similar. We’d seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But going to school was as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.
And, be it noted, in our generation there may not have been so many parents working from home, but there were plenty of stay-at-home mums (or, in my case, dads). If parents being at home was the decisive issue here, we’d surely have seen school refusal at epidemic levels between the 30s and 70s, when it was much less usual for both parents to leave the house to work. But we didn’t.
Parents are not encouraging this; but they are distressingly powerless to prevent it. You can’t, as once you could, threaten to paddle your child’s behind with a slipper if they don’t go to school. You cannot physically manhandle them out of the house, haul them by their earlobes into the back of the car and shove them with rough violence through the school gates. That way lies a far starchier encounter with social services – and possibly the police – than any amount of school refusal will get you.
The moment that a child realises that it can speak the magic words ‘I refuse’ (or, if it’s a Melvillean, ‘I would prefer not to’) that child’s parents are stuffed – and so, in a deeper sense, is that child. There’s something very serious going on here, and tut-tutting about working from home doesn’t, in my view, begin to account for it.
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