Post-Covid teaching hits that brick wall

WHEN I was at school, kids who played truant or "wagged it" as we used to say in West Yorkshire W were as rare as overweight ones. Now that we've left behind what we're always told were the bad old days, we manage to combine food banks with unprecedented levels of childhood obesityand, as the latest figures illustrate, staggeringly out of control absenteeism from the classroom.

- Fergus Kelly

Pupils defined as "severely absent" (ie: missed more than 50 per cent of lessons) rose by 134 per cent from 2019, the year before lockdown, to last year.

Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson took up the survey's findings to pledge that a Labour Government would tackle the "ghost children" crisis by introducing a national compulsory register of all pupils not in school, with parents having to provide information about what education their child is receiving at home.

She cited a school in Hastings, Sussex, where more than 47 per cent of its children were persistently absent in 2021-22. Equally scary was the survey at the start of the year that found one in three parents do not believe it is essential for their child to attend school every day.

The insistence of the teaching unions on keeping schools shut when all the evidence made clear that children were at scarcely any risk from Covid broke the unspoken contract between parents and schools.

So Phillipson's register proposal is sensible (though it isn't new: it was part of the Tories' 2022 Schools Bill since scrapped, you won't be surprised to learn).