The crisis of school absence in England could lead to an extra 9,000 young offenders by 2027 costing the taxpayer more than ÂŁ100 million, new research warns.
New figures show that the number of pupils missing over half of school time has more than doubled since the pandemic and that truancy makes kids three times more likely to commit a serious offence by the age of 17. The report from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has said school absence also disproportionately affects vulnerable kids who are likely to suffer more from less schooling.
The CSJ has analysed official data from the Department for Education and the Ministry of Justice and concluded that the current rates of school absence are likely to lead to a “tidal wave of youth crime”.
The report shows that 32 per cent of pupils missed more than ten per cent of school time in 2022, up from 16 per cent pre-pandemic. The number of persistently absent pupils rose to 1.7 million in the Autumn of 2022, a rise of over 800,000 since 2019. The CSJ says as many as 200,000 young people could belong to this “lost generation” of “ghost children”.
It comes just weeks after education secretary Gillian Keegan’s strong comments suggesting that headteachers should be going to truant pupils’ homes to get them back into school. Keegan told Sky News: “They [headteachers] do have a duty. We all have to play our part. Sometimes you have to go [to the home] or sometimes you have to text the parent in the morning. Sometimes you just have to do whatever is possible.”
When pressed on how she would deal with absent students, Keegan added: “I’d pick them up myself.”
The government has introduced non-statutory measures to help local councils address the absence crisis. However, the CSJ says that the new attendance guidance and local attendance mentor pilots do not go far enough. For instance, the mentors currently only reach one per cent of the 125,000 severely absent pupils.
The CSJ is calling for some of the ÂŁ114 million underspend on the National Tutoring Programme to be used to roll out attendance mentors nationally.
Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson used the damning figures to criticise the government’s “lack of grip on our education system”.
Former Conservative leader and CSJ co-founder Iain Duncan-Smith also commented on the matter, saying: “Abandoning a generation of children to absence will send a shockwave through society.”
A teacher at a state secondary school in London, Harry Hudson, confirmed to The Hound that “attendance has been a problem since the pandemic.”
“And whenever I speak to teachers from other schools in different parts of the country, they all say the same – attendance is definitely one of the biggest challenges facing schools at the moment.
“Part of the problem is that the more lessons pupils miss, the harder it becomes for them to catch up when they are in school, because the gaps in their knowledge will only have grown bigger in their absence. It becomes a bit of a vicious cycle, and leads to pupils feeling perhaps even more demotivated and dispirited than before.”
As for solutions, Hudson said: “more funding for more attendance officers might be an idea,” but advised that the government must be careful not to punish parents.
“Most parents want their children to go to school and do well, and therefore need support in getting their children to attend, not censure. Adopting too retributive an attitude towards this problem would in some cases only make it worse.”
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