With a record number of children refusing school since the pandemic, parental prosecutions have doubled in less than a year. Under the Government’s clampdown, each month 1,700 parents are being prosecuted for their children not going to school, while penalty fines have quadrupled in the last academic year, costing families as much as £12m.
But why are children refusing school? And should parents be penalised? The testimonies of teachers, psychologists, and the desperate parents driven to quitting their jobs to home-school their children, would suggest not. Because it is the potent combination of a post-pandemic increase in children’s anxiety, mental health problems and special educational needs (Sen), pressure from Ofsted, insufficient school funding, and long waiting lists for CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services) that are the root of this explosion. And it’s the children and their parents who are suffering.
Absences are 50 per cent higher this academic year than before Covid, with more than one in five children “persistently absent”, leaving record numbers of families turning to home education – and not by choice. New figures from the Department of Education (DfE) reveal an estimated 86,200 children were in “elective” home education on the census day this spring term, thought to be a 50 per cent rise since pre-Covid.
There are various routes into homes chooling: EOTAS (education otherwise than at school), where the local authority has responsibility and funds education; staying “on-roll” in the hope the child will return, or be issued an education health care plan (EHCP) to enable EOTAS; or withdrawal from the system (“off-rolling”).
Heidi Mavir, who supports families of children with Sen as founder of Education Otherwise Than at School Matters, faced refusal with her 15-year-old son. At first Theo avoided school because he had a headache, but then it progressed to panic attacks. “He became inconsolably distressed, and I couldn’t even put his blazer on,” she recalls. Little did she know that Theo had been masking autism. “Then we headed into a two-year period of trying to help him recover from that pretty mammoth breakdown.”
After Theo’s diagnosis, Mavir followed instructions from the school to come in to touch the gate to show her son that it wasn’t frightening, until they told her it was actually so they could mark him as present and improve attendance records. After all, schools can only receive “good” or “outstanding” Ofsted ratings if their attendance is high. Mavir was threatened with fines and prosecution.
When the family requested an EHCP, it was refused. It was only once Mavir – who had to give up her job – took the council to a tribunal in June 2020 that a plan was issued for EOTAS.
“In hindsight, it was the right thing,” says Mavir. “But it’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced. I was thinking about ending my life. I couldn’t see a way through and was so traumatised by it. I was absolutely terrified that I was going to go to jail, or that he was never going to recover, or that one or both of us were going to end up dead.” In Mavir’s community of nearly 10,000 families, each day someone is handed a fixed penalty and hundreds are in the process of being prosecuted. And she stresses that it’s not just a fine – it’s a criminal record.
Parents feel that they have few options: to pay, to plead “not guilty” in court, or to off-roll and register as home-educating, which is often seen as the simplest solution. “That’s happening increasingly,” says Mavir. “I see families going, ‘I can’t fight this system’. So we have this big batch of parents who are on paper electively home-educating, but it’s not elective. I can absolutely see why so many opt for that because it is so hard to get support when you have a child who can’t be in school.”
Ellie Costello, from Square Peg, an organisation raising awareness that not all children fit the current school model (especially Sen, anxious or bullied children), says attendance has been an “ignored national problem” going back years, predating Covid. In 2014, her children’s undiagnosed needs were put down to problem behaviour. Her daughter became increasingly anxious, until she refused school altogether. Costello found support by joining the Facebook group Not Fine in School, which launched in 2018. “It was a life raft,” she recalls. “I felt less alone.”
In five years, the group has amassed 30,000 families. Costello saw the membership requests creep up until the Government’s guidance to improve attendance through prosecutions and fines began in September, when they shot up 70 per cent. It is now receiving an “unprecedented” 1,500 to 1,900 requests each month.
Covid is partly to blame for absenteeism, she says – a catalyst in making the problem more widespread – not least because the response was to get children back to school as quickly as possible and “pretend nothing ever happened”, while many found it hard to readjust. But the overriding assumption as to what’s driving non-attendance has always been poor parenting.
“There’s a pernicious belief that the family is not trying hard enough,” she says. “So there’s a rigid attempt to get families to comply.” Instead, she blames the “systemic failings of policy and under-investment” in children and education. “It’s difficult for very stretched school leaders to consider the system itself might be part of the problem. This narrative that it’s poor parenting is easier than grappling with the big stuff.”
Threatened with prosecution, Jenny* was stunned that her 10-year-old child’s absences were marked as unauthorised, when they were driven by anxiety over upcoming SATs. “I told the school my child was experiencing bad anxiety and self-harming,” she says. But then she received a letter for a £2,000 fine, or prison. “It was a complete shock. It felt deeply wrong. And then your energy is taken away from supporting your child to fighting authorities.”
Jenny was handed leaflets about parenting courses. “The worst part is the parent blame,” she says. “I’m furious.” The school made Jenny sign an agreement that her child would go in, which only exacerbated the problem. And meetings with a counsellor, where the agenda was attendance, triggered more anxiety. “My child felt like they were doing something wrong. The head teacher was totally dismissive of their mental health.”
A survey published in February 2022 by Place2Be and the National Association of Head Teachers showed that mental health problems among pupils had increased since the start of the academic year, while the youth charity Beyond has seen a rise in children’s anxiety. With more than 25 per cent of the applications to Beyond’s schools mental health programme due to anxiety, and 12 per cent due to self-harm, the charity is one of many campaigning for the links between non-attendance and mental health to be recognised within school policy. Meanwhile, the Coalition of Young People’s Mental Health’s inquiry recommended that the DfE “review attendance codes for schools…recognising both mental-health problems and Sen and disabilities can be recorded as authorised absences”.
The charity Mind adds that the requirement to provide medical evidence is challenging for young people who face lengthy delays in accessing mental health support and leads to absences being recorded as unauthorised, and parents being fined and prosecuted.
“The situation in schools is awful,” says Beyond’s CEO, Louisa Rose, who saw a 92 per cent increase in school applications for funding in 2022, more than two-thirds of which blamed the pandemic. She tells of a school where no CAMHS referrals made since early 2022 had been accepted, and another which had 168 cases of self-harm in a three-month period last year. Shockingly, schools have been using the pupil premiums, provided by the government for deprived families, for mental health support in the absence of adequate funding.
Rose wants to see mental health embedded in the curriculum in the way that physical education is. “Until there’s a real parity, we will continue to see the decline that we’re seeing now. This one-size-fits-all approach that we’ve seen for decades doesn’t work anymore. We need a much more flexible and tailored approach.”
Emma’s* son, who is autistic, started refusing school after a traumatic transition from reception. “We have not chosen to home-school,” says Emma, whose son has received up to three hours of schooling per day since September. The six-year-old remains on-roll, but Emma claims the local authority has not fulfilled its responsibility. “Many children with Sen are ignored as the authorities do not have the funding or skills to support them in an outdated education system which is not fit for many. I am just one of the many parents navigating a bureaucratic system with little guidance or support. We are the forgotten ones.”
Given the record numbers of teachers exiting the profession, with the DfE revealing that 40,000 left state schools last year, and with unfilled vacancies at their highest, it begs the question as to whether the system is fit for purpose. An experienced teacher, Robert* has seen distressed pupils rocking with their hands over their ears in noisy classrooms. “On many occasions I’ve witnessed children quietly crying because they’re overwhelmed,” he says. “They don’t have the coping mechanisms for functioning in a busy classroom environment with 29 other children. It’s heartbreaking.”
A key challenge is the deficit in funding. In May, parents joined thousands of striking teachers on a march through London, not just to increase their pay, but for schools to receive the funding needed for adequate staffing and resources. Two more strike days are planned for July. It’s not unusual now for primary school teachers to be short of teaching assistants, tackling a room full of young children solo. That toxic pressure on teachers was highlighted earlier this year by the suicide of primary head Ruth Perry, following an Ofsted inspection.
The pressure, too, on schools to achieve results, means constant assessments and funds being funnelled into academia rather than wellbeing. Psychologist Naomi Fisher, who specialises in alternative approaches to education, recalls how a few years ago, to mention children refusing school would result in blank looks. “But everybody knows a child in this situation now.”
She blames the system, where the primary focus on attendance, league tables and results, on which schools are measured, is prioritised above anything else. “School leaders choose things that will give them those results, rather than feeling empowered and brave enough to spend money on pastoral care or training.”
Fisher wants to see more integration between those who can improve children’s mental health with school leaders, who “rarely” talk to psychologists. “We are effectively propping up the system. I see the children who have crashed out of the school system, or for whom it has gone badly wrong. But nobody asks for my feedback.” She points to the stages at which children are most likely to be referred to a psychologist: Year 1, when the free-play focus of early years shifts to more structured education, including their first screening in phonics, the transition to secondary school, and when GCSEs are approaching.
“Many families describe that as a cliff edge,” says Fisher. Research shows that many children at secondary school won’t have a meaningful connection with an adult the whole day – unless they are told off. “But nobody seems to be thinking, ‘The system needs to change so that we don’t have any points of vulnerability where we seem to be creating distress in our children.’ We’ve created these environments for our children which don’t take account of emotional wellbeing and then we see the consequences.”
Under the watchful eye of Ofsted, schools transfer the pressure to parents, who are pushed to send their unwell children in and typically given advice that makes matters worse. Instructions to stop children from doing things that they enjoy at home, or forcing them to go in, only have a negative impact on their mental health. The pressure on attendance has only had a “perverse effect”, says Fisher, “because the more those children are pushed, the more the families go downhill and the more likely they are to deregister.”
The problem is the rigidity of the one-size-fits-all approach and generic solutions, phrases that crop up repeatedly during my conversations. It’s no surprise that parents, who are not receiving the support they need to help their children back to school, reach the point where they feel they have no other option other than homeschooling.
Still, some children thrive outside of conventional schooling. Eliza Fricker, whose daughter stopped going to secondary school after one day, recalls the “unkindness” and how little her EHCP or diagnosis meant in terms of flexibility or compassion. They stayed on-roll, receiving top-up funding for holistic tuition. Today, however, the author is full of “relief”.
“We saw how ill the system had made her,” says Fricker. “While we have not gone the conventional route, we have a very happy, relaxed, engaged child who is independent and sociable. This was something we couldn’t imagine while she was in mainstream education.”
Ofsted says attendance is something considered during an inspection but “inspectors recognise that the context in which schools operate has changed as a result of the pandemic”. “Children do need to be in school, but we are most interested in what a school is doing to tackle attendance issues”.
Heidi Mavir’s Your Child Is Not Broken is published by Bluebird
Eliza Fricker’s Can’t Not Won’t is published by Jessica Kingsley
Naomi Fisher’s A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education is published by Jessica Kingsley