‘Heavy-handed’ crackdown ignores underlying reasons for failure to attend classes, say critics
Some schools in England are sending police to the homes of children who are persistently absent, or warning them their parents may go to prison if their attendance doesn’t improve, theHeadteachers say they are now under intense pressure from the government to turn around the crisis in attendance, with aat state schools classed as severely absent in 2022-23. From September, all state schools in England will have to share their attendance records every day with the Department for Education.
Oliver Conway, a child protection solicitor at London law firm Oliver Fisher, which is co-hosting a conference with Square Peg this week on the impact of prosecuting parents on attendance, said many poorer parents were unable to pay fines. He asked: “Why aren’t they giving these families proper mental health support and support from social services instead of trying to punish them?”
He said some of his clients struggled because the council was moving them from one temporary address to another much further away, meaning they had to take two or three buses to reach school.Ben Davis, headteacher of St Ambrose Barlow RC High in Salford, said: “We need to move away completely from this idea that people are swinging the lead.”
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