School attendance is

still down post Covid?

Apparently a third of state school students are missing from school at least one day a fortnight...or so the article says. Only fifty-eight percent of them are achieving a ninety percent attendance rate. Even in the fee paying system there seems to be a high absentee rate - only just under sixty-nine percent are achieving that ninety percent rate. This is down from seventy-two percent in state schools and eighty-two percent in fee paying schools pre-Covid.  

I suspect that even the pre-Covid rate is down on the levels of school attendance when I was a mere kitten. Yes, there was a truancy problem. There will always be a truancy problem but, back then, it was rarely condoned by parents. Even the worst offenders rarely had the support of their parents.

It is perhaps indicative of how much society has changed. Mum was more likely to be at home during the day so you could hardly head back home. Once you were home what did you do? There was no television, no computer, no screen based toy to entertain you. If you were caught wandering the streets then someone would haul you up.

I never skipped school. Most of the time of course I would have had no chance. My parents were there. They would have noticed my absence.  

There was an occasion on which I was spoken to by a policeman. I was in school uniform on a Friday afternoon. I was sitting on a seat at the country bus station waiting to catch the bus home for a "long weekend" from boarding school. For some reason we had also been given Friday afternoon as well as the Monday off. All I was permitted to do was sit at the bus station "doing homework" while waiting. Along came the policeman who asked what I was doing there. I thought it was pretty obvious but he was nevertheless checking. He wanted to see my ticket. I showed him and after a "don't talk to strangers" he was on his way. 

I wonder if he would do that now? I doubt it. There always seem to be students in uniform all over the place. It is one advantage of school uniform you may not know the individual student but you know their school. I would have to be doing something wrong for the police to stop and speak to me now. If I was sitting in the library with my laptop out in front of me it is unlikely that anyone would notice, especially if I went off at intervals as if attending lessons at the local high school.

In this street there are two children who seem to have frequent days away from school. They are less frequent now their work-from-home father has been forced to return to the office. I have talked to their parents of course but their attitude towards school attendance seems to be remarkably casual. They shrug and say, "Oh they catch up easily enough." Perhaps they do but that is surely hardly the point?

My own days off school were so rare they were remarkable. It was not that we were never ill. We simply were not allowed to be ill. Mum would only have kept us home if the law demanded it.  As a "Christian Scientist" she did not believe in illness. On those so very rare occasions we needed to be at home then it was my paternal grandmother who cared for us when we lived in the city. Out in "the bush" we stayed at home alone but we were given our school work to do. It did not matter if we were feeling ill or were actually being sick we had to do our work. Mum really believed this was the best thing for us. If we felt ill during school holidays we were expected to be up and dressed and "just sitting quietly".  Perhaps this is why we were so rarely ill?  

I wonder now whether all the potential entertainment at home is one contributing factor to absenteeism?  If both parents are at work and you can be pretty sure they won't be home until later, if you can forge their signatures on sick notes and more then the temptation to take a day off here and there might be greater than it was for us.

I still would not have been able to skive off but I might have wondered if I could do it - and get away with it.