Millie was seven years previous when she began combating going to high school. Her lecturers weren’t too apprehensive initially, her mom, Sarah, says: she was managing tremendous academically. However Millie, who’s autistic and has a sensory processing dysfunction, appeared to seek out the busy classroom overwhelming. The next 12 months, she started significantly to withstand.
“It would start the night before,” says Sarah, a youngsters’s nurse. “She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat her dinner, then in the morning she’d be absolutely flat out – it was taking an hour to get her out of bed. I would have to dress her, she’d be like a rag doll. And all the time they kept saying, ‘Just get her in, she’s fine once she’s in.’ It got to the point where I was physically unable to carry her, she’d be lying on the floor kicking and screaming.”
The primary Covid lockdown in spring 2020 was, for Millie, a welcome reduction. “You weren’t allowed to go to school, you weren’t allowed to leave the house, nobody was allowed to come round – it was good for her.” That September, Millie returned to high school armed with an Instructional Well being and Care Plan (EHCP), a press release of her particular wants, which was meant to ensure particular assist in class. However her mom says it wasn’t constantly adopted. Millie started having panic assaults, and the next autumn “she just had an absolute meltdown, breakdown, whatever you want to call it. So she stopped going to school.”
Sarah fought for a spot at a particular faculty with tiny lessons, which might ease her daughter again steadily. However midway by her first time period, Millie broke down once more. Now 12, her solely training for almost a 12 months has been work despatched dwelling by way of a hospital tutoring programme for chronically sick youngsters, and her dad and mom have drastically adjusted their expectations for her. “If she’s alive, happy … there’s so much more that’s relevant in life than going to university,” Sarah says. “The difficulty is she wants to be doing things. She loves learning.”
When Millie will get pissed off, she typically self-harms, pulling her hair out and selecting at her pores and skin until it bleeds. Sarah’s voice breaks as she discloses that her daughter used to say she’d fairly be lifeless, so she didn’t need to go to high school. “When she was saying those things, she was so young she didn’t even realise people can kill themselves. Now she’s older she knows suicide is a thing. That’s why we have to keep her safe at home.”
The pressure on the household is intense: Sarah has stopped work, her husband had a breakdown himself final 12 months, and she or he feels judged by different dad and mom. “People say, ‘Just tell them they have to go; shout at them, take their iPad away.’ And I say, ‘It’s not that they don’t want to go to school, it’s that they can’t.’”
As a brand new autumn time period begins, the largest problem for a lot of headteachers is getting youngsters by the door. After three years of fixed interruptions to training, from lockdowns to Covid outbreaks and educating strikes, attendance has crumbled. Persistent absence, outlined as lacking greater than 10% of classes, greater than doubled from 8% of main and 13.7% of secondary faculty youngsters pre-Covid throughout England to 17% and 28% respectively in 2022-2023. Rachel de Souza, youngsters’s commissioner for England, calculates that of the 1.6 million youngsters persistently absent in the course of the autumn and spring of 2021-22, 818,000 have been off for causes apart from the same old childhood sicknesses. Many of those absentees are worryingly weak: youngsters with particular academic wants or disabilities (SEND) and kids on free faculty meals are disproportionately extra more likely to be persistently off. However absence is a posh, many-headed hydra.
Some dad and mom have seemingly realized to deal with training extra casually, taking low-cost term-time holidays or permitting “duvet days”. (The Instagram parenting influencer Molly Gunn not too long ago confessed to letting her youngsters take birthdays, “lounging days” and 6 weeks in Ibiza off.) On the different finish of the spectrum are the “ghost children” supposedly vanishing from colleges in the course of the pandemic and doubtlessly vulnerable to falling into crime or abuse. Although there are few dependable estimates for what number of youngsters have truly fallen off the radar fully, within the autumn of 2020 93,514 youngsters have been absent greater than 50% of the time in contrast with simply over 60,000 pre-Covid.
However maybe probably the most perplexing downside dealing with headteachers is an obvious wave of continual nervousness in youngsters, resulting in what was previously generally known as faculty refusal – now termed “emotionally based school avoidance”. For some youngsters who discovered faculty tough and craved the consolation of dwelling, leaving the cocoon of lockdown was clearly powerful. However for others, nervousness appears to have emerged solely beneath the stress and isolation of the pandemic. And typically youngsters’s personal emotions might be arduous to disentangle from these of fogeys anxious about mixing socially once more. Regardless of the trigger, this autumn provides a vital alternative for a contemporary begin.
“September is the moment,” says De Souza, who fears that if absence isn’t solved now, then it could turn out to be baked in, with lifelong penalties for probably the most deprived. “Every child, however difficult it is and for whatever reason they might be out of school, will think again in September.” The training secretary Gillian Keegan can be getting ready an autumn offensive, interesting this summer time for heads to fetch youngsters in from dwelling themselves if needed.
However mother or father teams resembling Not Fantastic in College and Sq. Peg, representing households like Sarah’s, say crackdowns on nonattendance threat stigmatising these whose youngsters genuinely can’t cope. They need higher pastoral care and SEND provision in colleges as an alternative, and for kids’s happiness to be prioritised. “All we’ve been measuring is results, tests, exams,” says Sq. Peg’s director, Ellie Costello. “I think our children have been holding a mirror up to us – the life we are asking them to live, the expectations on them, the pressures on them.” This isn’t simply an argument about attendance – partly, it’s concerning the nature of childhood itself.
Growing up in Middlesbrough, in a neighbourhood the place, he says wryly, teenage boys might rise up to all types, sport evidently helped maintain Michael Robson on monitor. A former skilled footballer – he signed to Sunderland straight from faculty however by no means fairly made the large time – he’s pleasant however brisk, with an athlete’s iron self-discipline. He waves away the proffered sandwich lunch once we meet at Grangefield academy available in the market city of Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham.
Robson is now a senior govt on the Northern Schooling Belief, which oversees this faculty and a scattering of different academies alongside the north-east coast, from the previous mining group of Blyth down by Hartlepool to close by Redcar. However earlier than the pandemic, he was headteacher at North Shore academy, the belief’s different faculty in Stockton, the place he oversaw an uncompromising strategy to boosting attendance (since adopted trust-wide) dubbed “exemplary” by the colleges minister Nick Gibb. (The belief’s CEO, Rob Tarn, now sits on the Division for Schooling’s Attendance Motion Alliance, serving to unfold finest observe nationwide by way of regional attendance “hubs”, or native clusters of colleges who share methods.) Right here, then, is the federal government’s favoured recipe.
Work begins properly earlier than the varsity day begins, with the attendance crew visiting some youngsters earlier than they’ve even had an opportunity to bunk off. “We’ll knock on the door at 7.30am and say, ‘Don’t forget, you’re in school today,’” explains Andrew Murphy, Grangefield’s equally energetic govt principal. Lists of absentees are generated inside minutes of registers being taken; all can then count on a telephone name or knock on the door, even when dad and mom ring in to report a baby is sick. (Absence is taken into account a safeguarding concern, as a result of for some youngsters, failing to show up might sign they’re in peril, at dwelling or elsewhere.) Within the afternoons, employees may telephone dad and mom of kids reported sick to ask in the event that they’ll be again tomorrow, or go to hardened absentees who don’t reply a morning knock. And if it doesn’t work? “Keep trying – we go again,” Robson says. The belief’s ethos is the “no excuses” strategy beloved of Michael Gove in his time as training secretary – which implies no blaming difficult circumstances, although these colleges serve the form of deprived, primarily white working-class communities the place attendance was traditionally tough even pre-Covid. “We should be able to do it for the kids in this community, and we don’t expect less of them,” Robson provides firmly.
All this prices cash – Grangefield has entry to 5 studying managers, an academic welfare officer and safeguarding officer, which Robson says is reasonably priced solely as a result of they belong to an enormous multi-academy belief. And crucially, it additionally includes carrots alongside the stick. Strolling spherical the varsity, the corridors ring to the sound of applause: youngsters listed here are taught to clap good solutions from classmates, and people who go the additional mile get their names written up on the classroom door. On each desk sit containers of apparatus to which pupils might help themselves – not each household right here can afford pens and rulers – and a strict uniform coverage is maintained by making certain no person goes with out. “If it’s a hardship, we’ll give them a blazer; if they’ve no shoes, we will give them shoes. If they’ve forgotten something, we’ll lend it,” Robson says. Throughout lockdown the belief purchased each little one a laptop computer; anybody not logged on by the point on-line classes began received a telephone name or go to.
Then there may be the Bridge, a small nurturing unit designed to ease youngsters again in the event that they’ve been off with severe sickness or are weak for different causes. “You might have a child who is out of school and the prospect of returning to a big cohort is terrifying. For some we’ll say, ‘You just need to come in at these hours and work with a teaching assistant or tutor in your own room,’” Robson says. In close by Redcar, the belief tried taking severely absent children to make issues within the engineering division of a neighborhood faculty or on outside actions: something to rebuild relationships with lecturers.
But for all this, attendance stays a “daily battle”: whereas it’s nonetheless above the nationwide common at North Shore, it’s not but again to pre-Covid ranges. And, fairly tellingly, that sample isn’t simply confined to youngsters. In 2022, the 12 months the pandemic formally ended, illness absence amongst working adults was increased than in any 12 months since 2004. Virtually half of adults nonetheless work at the very least typically from dwelling. In demanding youngsters snap again to the previous norm, society is arguably asking extra of them than of grownups. What’s extra, when colleges minister Gibb was requested by MPs this 12 months a couple of reported rise in nervousness amongst youngsters, he mentioned dwelling working might have allowed some dad and mom to maintain at dwelling anxious youngsters who would as soon as have needed to go to high school.
There may be nonetheless little arduous analysis on what number of youngsters are experiencing sustained nervousness about faculty post-lockdown. The NHS discovered one in six youngsters aged 5 to 16 had a possible psychological well being dysfunction in the summertime of 2020, up from one in 9 three years earlier. In line with the colleges insurer Zurich final 12 months, a staggering 42% of fogeys felt their youngsters skilled frequent nervousness. However it’s not at all times clear what that catch-all phrase “anxiety” means, particularly given the lengthy waits many youngsters face for evaluation by an NHS specialist. It’s a delicate topic round which Robson treads audibly rigorously.
“I think society is better for being accepting of, ‘Look, it’s OK to say I’m struggling.’ I think we would all recognise that we are better off in a world where you don’t have to bottle things up,” he says, stressing that he doesn’t need to sound like a dinosaur. However nonetheless, it’s sophisticated. “Some young people are really, really struggling and need some help and support, and I don’t think anyone would deny that. Some young people might say that they’re socially anxious but not understand that this is perfectly normal, to walk into a room of 200 people and feel a bit anxious. You have not ‘got anxiety’, you are anxious.” He has, he notes, encountered youngsters reportedly too anxious for college however seemingly comfy sufficient in a crowd at Middlesbrough Soccer Membership on weekends.
How does a mother or father inform the distinction between regular childhood worries and one thing extra severe? It’s necessary to not over-medicalise youngsters’s feelings, says Stevie Goulding, co-manager of the mother or father helpline at psychological well being charity Younger Minds. Being anxious about exams, for instance, is regular and even wholesome: “It helps you to focus, to get that adrenaline pumping.”
But when nervousness persists when exams are over, or lasts for greater than 4 to 6 weeks with no apparent set off, or spills over into dwelling life and actions youngsters usually get pleasure from, there is perhaps trigger for concern. If a baby is actively resisting going to high school, Goulding recommends sticking to the same old morning routine regardless. “Wake up with the expectation that they get up for school, have their breakfast, get their uniform on, while having awareness that they might not be able to leave the house.” Dad and mom ought to attempt to set up precisely what’s worrying them – maybe a selected lesson, instructor or friendship – and maintain chasing any promised intervention by the varsity. Many youngsters with particular academic wants try to keep up a traditional facade in school and explode solely after they get dwelling, she factors out, that means lecturers might not at all times realise how severe issues are.
Fourteen-year-old Dilly comes throughout as articulate, charming and chatty over Zoom from dwelling in Essex. The one clue as to the hassle that could be costing her is that we’re speaking on a Sunday morning, as a result of by the top of a college day she’s too drained. Dilly is nice at “masking”, or disguising her autistic traits to slot in, nevertheless it wears her out. “A lot of the time I don’t realise how big an effort I’m putting in. I only realise when I’m exhausted later and don’t have any patience and can’t think about anything,” she says cheerfully. In a crowded room, she says, she’s going to really feel hyper-aware of issues others wouldn’t register – “people’s conversations, people coughing, sniffing, everything” – which might make it overwhelming.
Dilly’s faculty avoidance began at nursery. Can she describe the way it feels? “Very anxious. I sort of build up in my head what it’s going to be – this is going to happen and if that happens, that’s going to happen – like a whole catastrophic thing.” Generally she begins worrying concerning the subsequent day as quickly as she will get dwelling. “I’ll get stressed about what happens tomorrow, or I haven’t done this homework and the teacher’s going to get cross with me and then I’m going to get upset and this is going to happen. Sometimes there’s not a reason – most of the time there is.” Her supreme faculty can be “much more personal, shorter days, no homework and no tests”.
Dilly now attends a tiny unbiased faculty of solely 100 pupils, geared to coping with her autism and dyslexia. Although it’s nonetheless typically arduous to make herself go in, she’s motivated by desirous to get some {qualifications} and fulfil her ambition of changing into a movie producer. However, as her mom acknowledges, she’s arguably one of many fortunate ones.
Stephanie Rocke’s son, Alton, was in 12 months one when he stopped desirous to go to his Northamptonshire main faculty. All the time an anxious little one, he started struggling what appeared like panic assaults; his 12 months two instructor instructed he may need some type of particular academic want, although no person was fairly certain what (he’s since been recognized with ADHD and autism). Then, disastrously, lockdown hit. “He couldn’t engage at all in home learning,” Rocke says. “That’s when we started seeing the first signs of him hitting himself, calling himself stupid, getting frustrated. After a month we just gave up completely – it was too stressful for everyone.” It was solely when faculty resumed that she realised how far behind he was.
He has an EHCP now with a “list of provisions a mile long”, which Rocke says the varsity merely couldn’t ship. “They just say, ‘If we don’t have the staff available … ’” Each September, he would begin out optimistic, solely to wind up withdrawn by Christmas and in meltdown by March. By the spring of 12 months 5, she says, he wasn’t consuming, sleeping or interacting with the household. “We kept getting told that he should be going to school, should be getting an education – we knew he wasn’t learning, but we felt we’d got to keep doing the right thing and sending him in, even though it didn’t feel like the right thing. And he just kept getting worse.” This March, the couple eliminated him; they’re ready to listen to if he has received in to a faculty specialising in autism.
Rocke and her husband, who run their very own enterprise, have taken out loans to cowl the price of therapists, psychologists and solicitors to argue their case with the native training authority. Some SEND moms she is aware of have given up work to dwelling faculty. “That’s what happens – especially women, especially mothers. They have no career, no job, no lives outside their children because they care for them full-time. It’s shocking.”
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Suzie is one of those mothers. Her eldest, 16-year-old Amelia, started struggling in social situations in year three of primary. “She started describing herself as an alien on planet Earth: she’d hide in the loos,” Suzie recalls. It was the family GP who first mentioned autism. “She was having to put so much energy into holding it all together at school, it was like a Coke bottle that’s been shaken: if you take the top off, it explodes everywhere.”
Moving Amelia to a small private school helped initially, but by year seven she was self-harming and saying she didn’t want to live. Just before the first lockdown, her parents began home schooling her.
Meanwhile her younger sister Evie, now 13, was showing signs of distress. “Lockdown really unsettled her and she struggled to go back – we know now it was because she really liked the much calmer environment at home. It showed families there’s another way of doing this. We don’t have to put them through the hell of school every day.” When lockdown ended and Evie returned to school, she had trouble sleeping. Then she stopped eating. “In May 2022 she also turned round and said to us, ‘I don’t want to be here any more.’ School has driven both our daughters to be suicidal,” says Suzie, who gave up her job in the wine trade to watch over her daughters and hasn’t worked since.
Both girls are now back in school. Evie, who has been diagnosed with ADHD, generalised anxiety disorder and autism, is well enough to attend the same small independent college as her sister and their local education authority eventually agreed to pay their fees on the grounds that no suitable state setting is available. “Every single step of the way we’ve either had to pay for the help we needed or fight horribly for it,” Suzie says. “I’m very lucky we don’t need me to rush back to work. We do have the resources to fight for our kids. But so many parents don’t and that’s why so many kids go missing. They can’t cope, there’s nothing else and nobody to help them.”
All three families belong to a support network run by Square Peg and Not Fine in School, which swelled rapidly last summer ahead of the first term back with no allowances made for Covid – and pressure to get attendance back on track. “We had [then education secretary] Gavin Williamson saying, ‘We’ve relaxed the measures, everybody back to normal’ but you can’t treat a population like a machine that’s on or off,” says Square Peg’s Ellie Costello. More than a third of families in its Facebook group have children with SEND, she says, and some battled for years to get EHCPs, only to find the promised support isn’t forthcoming. Yet the law requires them to send their children to school anyway, or risk being taken to court for nonattendance (prosecutions brought by councils have doubled in less than a year, according to the Ministry of Justice, with fines of up to £2,500 – like speeding tickets, they can be issued by magistrates in the parent’s absence). While some heads argue that prosecution is a valuable deterrent for otherwise uncooperative parents, Costello points to hard cases such as the lone parent who contacted her after being fined in absentia while undergoing chemotherapy. “She got home to see that the hearing had happened and she owed £800 plus costs. If you don’t open your mail, or are on your own and struggling, these notices get lost.” Some of the parents she meets have been accused of being “difficult” or adversarial by their children’s schools, she says. “But why do people become these things? Because they’re not listened to, or they feel judged or blamed.”
As children’s commissioner, it is De Souza’s job to listen. A warm, dynamic steelworker’s daughter from Scunthorpe, until early 2021 she ran an academy trust famous for its hard-driving “no excuses” philosophy. But the stories she has heard from children in this job seem to have shifted her perspective. Immediately after being appointed, she held a consultation about how Covid had affected children. “It’s really seared on my mind, some of the conversations I had going round the country in March 2021, talking to very socially confident youngsters who you would have thought would be fine but who said, ‘Basically my world stopped,’” she says. “I talk to hundreds of children every month, and they will all talk about this. We have really underestimated it.”
Initially, she assumed any anxieties about returning to school would fade relatively quickly. But the more she studied attendance data in that first year back, the more it worried her. In hindsight, De Souza thinks children needed more help readjusting to the outside world. “We should have been concerned with children before it was, bang, back into the classroom, into exams. We should have been opening up school buildings, public buildings, got our youth workers and said, ‘Children have taken an unbelievable hit, we should be getting them out, having some fun.’ I never thought I’d hear myself saying that,” she says, laughing. “There’s room in schools for fun, for play, for thriving communities.”
It’s not, she stresses, that she has abandoned the drive for educational excellence. “The golden thread right through my career has been ensuring kids from the most disadvantaged areas get the opportunities. It’s just how and what you need to do to achieve that. I have been able to see more widely, and see even better ways to do that. I realise that we’re not islands.” Over the summer she discussed with GPs, police and others how they could cooperate in getting missing children back to school. “We need the NHS not to be issuing children with multiple disabilities with appointments on four different days. We need all the services to be seeing attendance for what it is, a proxy for children’s wellbeing.” School is, she says, critical not just for educational reasons – children with good attendance records do better in GCSEs and A-levels than those without – but for mental health, with research suggesting teenagers in particular are happier when they’re around their peers. Sadly, it’s also critical for some children’s safety. She still wonders whether six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, who died at the hands of his father and stepmother in lockdown, might have lived under a teacher’s watchful eye.
Summarising her findings for MPs earlier this year, De Souza identified unmet special educational needs, mental health and young carers missing school to look after their parents as key problems with attendance. A recent government green paper on improving provision was full of good ideas, she says, but needs boosters under it: “My worry is the funding for that is two years down the line – we need it now.” Though government plans to train mental health leads in schools are welcome, she says, NHS children’s and adolescent mental health services aren’t coping with a rise in demand either: “It takes funding, it needs a proper plan.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Education said it recognised that the pandemic had affected children’s mental health and that some faced greater barriers to attendance than others, adding: “That’s why we are ensuring pupils with SEND receive the provision they require through new national standards and earlier intervention, alongside reforms to the SEND system that will give families greater confidence that their children will be able to fulfil their potential through improved mainstream provision in their local area.”)
But schools can help, De Souza thinks, by teaching strategies for managing anxiety. Visiting a secondary school in Bolton where a staggering 30 local parents had died of Covid, she expected to find the pupils traumatised; but instead they talked about how teachers had helped them support each other through tough times. “These children were in the worst situations and they were finding a way to grow through it and not let it hold them back.” The key, she argues, is fostering emotional resilience, or the ability to bounce back from difficult experiences. And that’s what lies behind a pilot project on attendance now under way in a deprived part of Liverpool, a city that has seen its share of hard times.
On a sunny morning in Whitefield primary school, the playground is full. Three small girls are chalking pictures on the tarmac under headteacher Jill Wright’s window, while other children play handball or career around in toy cars. Wright introduced longer breaktimes after realising how much children had missed out on playing together during lockdown. But, crucially, her teachers don’t just supervise; they join in. “The staff here teach play,” Wright explains. “They go out and play to make those relationships with the children.”
Relationships are key at Whitefield, a so-called trauma-informed faculty – one primarily based on understanding how childhood trauma impacts growth – serving a proud however deeply disadvantaged neighbourhood. Pupils converse 30 languages between them, a 3rd have SEND and nearly half are eligible for pupil premium; some have had tough early lives. However Wright is fiercely formidable for them and so, she says, are their dad and mom. The varsity has above common attendance for the realm. “I can’t think of any of our families who don’t want the absolute best for their children, who don’t have the same aspirations they’d have if they lived in the [more affluent] south end of the city. It’s that some face different barriers we have to support them to overcome.” As we stroll by calm, orderly lecture rooms and corridors twinkling with fairy lights, she explains how the varsity has been geared to scale back nervousness ranges. The 12 months six classroom feels nearly homelike, with padded seats and a snug couch. If a baby is absent, lecturers inform them after they return that they’re a part of the varsity household and it’s not the identical with out them. There are not any detentions for dangerous behaviour however, Wright insists, “That’s not to say everyone does what they like.”
As an alternative her deputy Marie Beale has led a programme inside faculty educating youngsters to manage their feelings, serving to them calm themselves after they’re anxious or offended and settle all the way down to studying. Emotions are colour-coded – the purple zone is for anger or worry, yellow for nervousness or over-excitement, blue for unhappiness – to assist youngsters establish feelings and perceive that they’ll change zones through the use of easy methods resembling counting slowly again from 10, enjoying outdoors or discussing their emotions with a grownup. Final 12 months Beale started coaching dad and mom to make use of these methods at dwelling, funded by the Leeds-based charity Shine (which works with colleges throughout the north to shut the hole between deprived and higher off youngsters).
“Instead of coming in saying, ‘He’s really angry this morning’ they can say, ‘He’s in the red zone, I’ve tried to get him in, I don’t know what to do,’” Beale says. Beforehand, dad and mom may find yourself shouting at youngsters to go to high school in desperation, however now they produce other instruments. “Parents who have done the work on emotions, they understand the children are not being awkward.”
But as at Grangefield, the principles are very clear. Failure to name in and clarify absence from faculty or its hooked up nursery prompts a name or dwelling go to, and fogeys are fined for taking term-time holidays. If youngsters are off sick, the varsity’s heat and motherly household liaison officer, Marguerite Younger, will use her judgment on whether or not to name dad and mom and gently attempt to discover out if complaints of tummy ache is perhaps masking one thing else. “If you know the child, you know the family, you can speak to Mum and say, ‘Do you think this is anxiety?’ and we will get to the root of it,” she explains. Generally she’ll provide to fetch a baby herself within the morning, and a few pupils sit together with her for 10 minutes earlier than the day begins, to calm themselves. The concept is to do no matter it takes to get anxious youngsters in, so absence doesn’t turn out to be a behavior; dad and mom are reminded that classes construct on one another, so if a baby misses someday, the following will probably be more durable. However the bottom line is profitable households’ belief, Younger says. “They know me and I know them, they can ring me on my mobile if they’re having a bad morning.”
The entire strategy, Wright provides, is to stroll a mile in dad and mom’ sneakers fairly than blaming them if they’ll’t get their youngsters in. “It’s easy to sit in judgment and say, ‘You’ve got to do this, you’re the parent, it’s your responsibility.’ If you say that without underpinning it with support for the child or the parent, you’re just adding pressure to an already pressured situation.”
Whereas her strategies might simply be caricatured as chalk to the extra strong cheese supplied by Grangefield academy, visiting each reveals not simply the hidden nuances however how intently every strategy is tailor-made to native want. Michael Robson acknowledges some communities may discover his dwelling visits intrusive; Jill Wright accepts what works in her small main, the place lecturers can get to know all of the households, may not swimsuit an enormous, nameless secondary. However primaries can, she argues, assist secondaries by ingraining good habits early on. (Shine’s CEO, Helen Rafferty, says analysis reveals youngsters who attend nursery aged two go on to have higher faculty attendance data after they’re older.) It’s by beginning with the youngest youngsters that attendance appears more than likely to be cracked ultimately. However that isn’t a lot consolation to the households throwing in the towel now.
If Millie’s mom Sarah might write training coverage, she says wistfully, she’d throw “all the money in the world” at coaching lecturers in neurodiversity. As it’s, she and her husband typically fantasise about dropping out of the system. “We go on Rightmove and say, ‘Let’s buy a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, just move there and give up on everything and everyone, and live our lives and be safe,’” she sighs. “But in reality, that’s not the way. It’s getting the people who have the power to make things change.”
