Pupils More Likely to Miss School on Fridays as Parents Work From Home, MPs Told

Year 8 students wear masks as they take part in an English class at Park Lane Academy in Halifax, northwest England, on Jan. 4, 2022. Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images

More pupils have been missing school on Fridays since the COVID-19 pandemic because parents tend to work from home on those days, a parliamentary committee was told.

An analysis of attendance data from before and after the pandemic suggests some pupils are now not going in to school on Fridays, a trend which did not exist before the pandemic, said Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England.

She told the Education Select Committee of the House of Commons on Tuesday: “We’re seeing a huge amount of Friday absence that wasn’t there before. Parents are at home on Fridays. We’ve had evidence from kids, ‘Well, you know mum and dad are at home, stay at home.’

De Souza said educators are seeing “slightly different attitudes” from parents following the COVID-19 lockdowns.

She called for more effort to boost attendance, saying it is “everyone’s business.”

“All of us, particularly ministers, leaders of education, leaders of local authorities, MPs, are saying how important that contract between parents and schools is and how important school is for children.

“It’s not just about getting a great education. It’s also safeguarding, good mental health, all the activities, the wider things we want. We need our children back to school and I just can’t urge everyone enough to be singing that from the rooftops. It’s a question of messaging.”

Persistent Absence

The commissioner told MPs that levels of “persistent absence”—where children miss 10 percent or more of school time—remain high following COVID-19.

She cited figures which estimate that 818,000 of the 1.6 million children who were persistently absent across the autumn and spring terms in 2021 and 2022 were off school for reasons other than illness.

De Souza said she is “seriously worried” about the number of children who are persistently absent, adding that it has become “one of the issues of our age.”

She told MPs that discussions with families have exposed a number of reasons why the pandemic is still having a negative impact on attendance.

“One is, because of online learning in COVID-19, there’s a little bit of ‘Well, why can’t we just have online learning and that’s fine.’ So that attitude has come through a bit,” she said.

She said the main reasons why children are off school is because their special educational needs are not being met, as well as anxiety and mental health issues.

But she added there is also a group of pupils who have “just not come back” since the pandemic.

Children in a school in the United Kingdom on Sept. 12, 2018. PA

Disengagement with Education

Alice Wilcock, head of education at the Centre for Social Justice think tank, told MPs that she is witnessing “a great shift towards disengagement with education.”

“Local authorities said to us that the pandemic taught parents that sometimes school is important and sometimes it’s not, and that is really ingrained in our attendance patterns.”

Wilcock also said problems with social media use have worsened during the lockdowns, which many parents are unprepared for.

She said: “Especially post-lockdown, I think parents are facing social media that they’re not familiar with, that they don’t necessarily know about the online world.

“Bullying used to be in the classroom and quite visible. Now it’s online and parents don’t feel equipped to tackle that. And also parents don’t feel equipped to tackle the gaming addictions that started during the pandemic.”

Social Contract Broken

This is not the first time educators have warned about low school attendance following the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Amanda Spielman, chief inspector of UK education watchdog Ofsted, said in December that pupil attendance was running “persistently” lower than before the pandemic, which had become “a deep and concerning problem.”

She said: “For many years, I think there’s been a very clear social contract. On the one side, the clear expectation is that parents should get their children to school every day, unless the child is too ill to go to school. And in return schools will do everything they can to give the child a good education and to prepare them really well for their futures, for their adult life.

“The pandemic disruption, and the expectation that children should be kept at home, broke that. So for significant periods children were educated as best they could be remotely. And that broke down that structure, that routine of getting children up and to school every day.”

She said the schools inspectorate has seen attendance “running persistently somewhat lower than pre-pandemic, over and above anything that could be attributed to illness.”

Spielman warned that some families appear to have “lost sight” of the expectation that children should be sent out every morning to be educated in person.

She added: “For a minority of families, that expectation of consistent attendance has broken down. Schools are working really hard to reestablish that. I know that immense amounts of work are going into helping families and children.”

PA Media contributed to this report.