Increased anxiety and lack of mental health support are driving a steep increase in children missing school since the Covid pandemic, with some children “struggling to leave home”, according to councils in England.
Local authorities are also highlighting budget pressures that have forced cuts in school support staff, with some schools trying to “manage” students out of classrooms or disguising their attendance records, while others are “off-rolling” students to artificially boost school exam results.
Evidence presented to MPs on the Commons education select committee claims parents are more cautious about sending their children to school with minor ailments as a result of public health messaging during the pandemic.
The submissions from local authorities come as policymakers and school leaders are grappling with how to bring down sustained levels of absences in classrooms.
The latest attendance data from the Department for Education (DfE) revealed that absences in the spring term this year were still 50% higher than before the pandemic, while in 2021-22 more than one in five secondary pupils were “persistently absent” for missing 10% or more of sessions.
In its evidence to the committee, which is holding an investigation into school absence, Essex council said: “Anxiety and mental health concerns are one of the most significant drivers behind our recent increase in persistent/severe absence from school.
“We have noted a significant growth in the cohort of children and families who struggle to leave their home. Some of these families were experiencing anxiety prior to the pandemic but many of the current mental health and anxiety presentations appear to have developed during the pandemic/lockdown periods.”
The council said mental health support services were unable to cope with the growing number of cases. “As a result, our schools report a significant growth in the cohort of children who either do not attend school whilst they await their assessment and treatment or have persistent/severe absence patterns which can be difficult to challenge,” it said.
The Local Government Association (LGA) said schools had been forced to make cuts in pastoral support, making it harder to encourage vulnerable children to attend.
“Some schools have managed these pressures by practices to influence which students are admitted or practices designed to manage children out of the school, such as the inappropriate use of attendance codes, part-time timetables, informal exclusions, off-rolling, and inappropriate use of permanent exclusion,” the LGA said in its evidence.
The LGA said there were “increasing numbers of children in the mainstream school system with additional needs that can cause barriers to school attendance”, including trauma, deprivation and poverty.
Essex council said public health advice issued during the pandemic had “reconditioned” attitudes in favour of keeping children off. “Some parents/families, who valued good school attendance prior to Covid, may now allow their children to remain at home with minor ailments which they would previously have considered invalid,” it said.
The DfE’s plans to reduce absences include local authorities making greater use of legal powers to enforce attendance. Councils told MPs that while they supported the DfE’s aims, they lacked the resources to carry them out.
“Many local attendance teams are already operating at stretched capacity. Councils have consistently fed back to us that they fundamentally lack the capacity and resources within their school attendance teams to fulfil the new duties given the increase in the number of schools they will be working with,” the LGA said.
Essex said the DfE’s plans would require it to have 40 attendance officers, compared with the eight it can afford to employ. “We will not be able to achieve this level of staffing without additional ringfenced funding,” the council stated.
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