Skipping school is

not something you can do if you are "the teacher's kid" or you need to catch the big yellow school bus driven by a teacher.

Truanting was actually very rare in the rural schools I attended. If you were not there then everyone knew about it. You could not get lost in a crowd of a thousand or more students at secondary level. There were simply not that many students. At primary level it was even more difficult because you were under the eye of one teacher for almost the entire day. If you disappeared then search parties went out. Your parents would be told. If you tried it on then you would likely be given a "good wallop" by your father.

Yes, of course there were children and teenagers who truanted back then but it did not occur to most of us to do it. School was somewhere you simply had to go. You had to work when you got there. Some of it was okay, some of it was boring. There were parts which were sometimes quite interesting. No, I did not like school much but I would never have considered not being there by choice.

There is yet another article about truanting in the paper. Apparently there are 1.4m children who are absent from school for at least 10% of the time. The attendance rate pre-Covid was 73% and it has dropped to 59.8%. Among students in indigenous schools it is even lower having gone from 46.9% to 35.2%. The writer of the article has attempted to put it in context by saying that almost half of all students in years seven to ten lost a month of schooling last year. As at least some students were there all the time then there are students losing much more time than that. 

It is apparently much more difficult to "skive off" if you attend a private (fee paying) or Catholic school. There are several around here and their pupils are rarely seen in the shopping centre during school hours.  If they are there then it is because of things like dental appointments or other medical reasons. They almost always have parents or grandparents or another adult with them. 

For the two big secondary schools it is a different story. Their students can be seen at almost any time. Ask them what they are doing and they will claim they have "free periods". There seem to be a lot of those. We did not know what they were. Homework was heaped upon us. There was no "hanging around" the shopping centre or the fast food places across the road. (There were no fast food places!) 

So many of the students tell me school is "boring". It was often not very interesting when I was at school but we did not expect it to be interesting all the time.  I suspect what has changed is the expectation school will be like their surfing on the internet. It will be slick and fast. Above all it will be "entertaining". These students expect to be entertained non-stop. 

School is not like that of course. It should not be like that. Perhaps if we want to change this then we need to change the way we treat learning at the pre-school level.  As we now seem to think it is necessary to teach pre-school children to learn to "code" this is unlikely to happen.

My own belief, and that of the late Senior Cat, is that schools need to change. For at least a good part of each day there needs to be a return to actual teaching - the sort where you face a teacher and are required to listen and answer questions asked of you. There would be no "screen" based learning during those times.  What is more there would be a requirement to use pen and paper at those times. I know it sounds very "old-fashioned" but research suggests those things may actually work.  

I also want to see a return to learning of practical skills for those students who do not see "university" in their futures. Why on earth do we think that these things are no longer important enough to be taught in schools here? Are these things really less important than teaching children about "gender", "racism" and "sexism"? Do they matter less than knowing about Eid Mubarak and Divali but not about Christianity?

I am wondering if we will end up with a society where half the population is "educated" and the other half is not. We voted back in a government that is going to continue the policies which ensure that too many students want to skive off school - and I am not sure the alternative government would have been much better.