Work-From-Home Parents Fueling Rise in Friday School Absences: Minister

Undated file photo of Education Secretary Gillian Keegan. (PA)

The education secretary has criticised parents for letting children miss school, noting a rise in Friday absences.

Gillian Keegan wrote in The Times of London on Friday that “there are regularly 50,000 more pupil absences on Fridays compared with Mondays, which could be linked with many parents working from home.”

“We are very clear: it is unacceptable to take a deliberate decision to take your child out of school,” Ms. Keegan wrote, adding that it matters because “every day a child is absent means they will miss on average five to six lessons — time they will never get back.”

Analysis by The Epoch Times of overall school absences in England from the week beginning Sept. 11, 2023 to April 19, 2024, found that Fridays had the highest absence rate at 7.8 percent, with Monday absences in second, at 7.1 percent. Wednesdays had the lowest absence rate at 6.6 percent.

Some individual days in the current academic year had particularly high absence rates, including March 28—the day before Good Friday, a bank holiday—which saw an average of 10.2 percent of children missing school. Oct. 20, 2023—the Friday before the Autumn half term for many schools in England—saw an absence rate of 9.5 percent. Jan. 2, 2024—the day when schools returned from the Christmas holidays—saw 10.1 percent of children missing school.

Lockdowns

Ms. Keegan is not the first leading figure in education to suggest a link between work-from-home parents and Friday school absences.

In March of last year, Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, told the Education Committee that several school multi-academy trusts gave her data on school absences before and after lockdown and said she saw a “huge amount of Friday absence that was not there before.”

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“Parents are at home on Fridays. We have heard evidence from kids, ‘Well, mum and dad are at home, so we stay at home,’” Dame Rachel told MPs.

In her opinion piece in The Times of London, Ms. Keegan acknowledged the impact that the COVID-19 lockdown—which brought with it both home working and online schooling—had had on current attendance rates.

“We know the COVID pandemic has had a major impact on school attendance all around the world. In England, we had reduced absence rates from 6 per cent in 2009 to 4.7 per cent in 2019, but the pandemic has completely changed this picture — with the 2021 absence rate rising to 7.6 per cent,” she wrote.

Government figures published in March showed that the number of unauthorised absences, in particular, from schools in England increased last year and was nearly double the rate from before the lockdown, going from 1.4 percent in 2018/19 to 2.4 percent in 2022/23.

The number of “persistently absent” pupils—where children miss 10 percent or more of school sessions—was 21.2 percent, nearly double the pre-pandemic rate of 10.9 percent in 2018/19.

In January, the centre-right Centre for Social Justice think tank found that the lockdown had affected parents’ perceived importance of school attendance. More than a quarter—28 percent—of parents think that the pandemic has shown it is “not essential for children to attend school every day.”

Mental Health

The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) challenged Ms. Keegan’s implication that parents were allowing children time off school “on a whim,” and suggested that other factors had contributed to the absences including mental ill-health.

NAHT General-Secretary Paul Whiteman said in a statement on the union’s website: “The issues we are seeing are the result of not just the pandemic, but a decade of government austerity in which support for families has effectively been rationed.

“Children are not getting the help they need with challenges in their lives - from poverty and mental ill-health, to insecure housing and special educational needs – and this affects school attendance. We should be particularly concerned about those pupils who are frequently and persistently absent from school.”

Mr. Whiteman called for more government investment, particularly in community services “like children’s mental health and social care” as well as for education welfare officers.

A young girl paints a picture of herself on the school window as children of key workers take part in school activities at Oldfield Brow Primary School in Altrincham, England, during the first COVID-19 lockdown on April 8, 2020. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

In March, the Children’s Commissioner released a report detailing that 949,200 children in England had been referred to Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services last year, representing 8 percent of the 11.9 million children across the country.

Dame Rachel warned there was a “growing group of children who are struggling with their mental health,” which she put down to several factors, including having spent their formative years during the COVID-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis.

Journalist and author Harriet Sergeant told NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” in February that children were still struggling from the “long term damage” of lockdowns, noting the rise of so-called “ghost children,” or pupils who have dropped off the school rolls.

Ms. Sergeant said one school counsellor had found absences fall into one of two categories: those that are “just too anxious to leave their room,” and those that are “so angry and aggressive they’re out on the street, they’re joining gangs, and they’ve just dropped out completely.”