If Only The Problem with School was Attendance
If only the problem was attendance. If only the real issue was just that children aren’t at school, and so they can’t learn. For then the solution would be so simple. Get them back to school and let the magic happen. No matter how hard it is. ‘Every day counts’ as they sometimes say (in which case, I’m stuffed, I missed an awful lot of school).
But attendance (and behaviour) isn’t the real problem. It’s the signal that something is wrong. It’s the sign that there is a problem. It’s the child waving flags, going ‘this isn’t working’. We won’t solve that problem by taking their flags away, or pretending they aren’t there.
There are many reasons those flags might be waving. Lots of them aren’t immediately obvious to adults or children. Our schools can be places of pressure and anxiety. They are often not developmentally informed. The focus is on following curriculum and text results rather than well being and learning about things which interest you. Relationships with teachers - particularly at secondary school - are highly conditional and there is very little time for meaningful connections. Behaviour policies are punitive and children tell me they are scared of them.
None of that is solved by insisting they attend. It just makes them more scared when they are told ‘Mummy might go to prison if you don’t come to school’ or ‘if you don’t go to school you’ll end up under a bridge’ (both things which real children I work with have been told). It won’t help to tell their parents to ‘make home less fun’. In fact, it can push our children from unhappiness into despair. It can cause them to retreat from everyone.
What if this focus on attendance is actually making things worse? What if the more pressure we put on, the more our children bend and some of them break? What if the schools we have created aren’t good places for lots of kids to learn, and they are signalling that to us?
What would it mean if we started with an open mind and said, millions of kids aren’t thriving at school. Maybe the problem isn’t them and their parents. Maybe, just maybe there’s something up with our system? What then?
Illustration by Eliza Fricker www.missingthemark.co.uk
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Totally agree with what you’re saying from both sides of the fence - as a parent and an ex-teacher. We now homeschool our children as the school system failed them. However, I don’t know if people are aware of how many teachers are stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to do the best they can with draconian measures imposed on them by management and the government, all of which makes their life difficult. I know I stayed in teaching far longer than was good for me because of trying to make a difference to those children who were trying to communicate their distress and not being listened to by ‘the system’, but as a teacher constantly being told by management to have ‘stronger behaviour management’ - i.e. tell them off rather than build relationships, do what is expected of the school policies rather than what you know the young people need, and your pay is dependent on how much you succeed ticking the boxes imposed on you. I’m not trying to justify the current school system - I left and we removed our kids - but I think it’s important to make sure people are aware that the vast majority of teachers are doing their best with a very broken system that they are powerless to fix from the grass roots level. We need to start listening to our children and overhauling the system to update what we want children to get out of it rather than maintaining the status quo just because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Take away the physical punishment and swap it for emotional punishment, take away the blackboard and swap it for a whiteboard and you’ll find little change in attitude from Victorian times. We still think that if a teacher stands up and tells children what they will learn that they will learn it despite the masses of research showing that kids need to have autonomy in their learning and be curious about the world to make learning stick. I hope that the calls for school reform following the pandemic and recent news stories will affect real change rather than just a new set of rules.
"What if the more pressure we put on, the more our children bend and some of them break?" This is happening to so many children. Some of them never recover. It's a scandal in plain sight.