Pupils skipped 8 million school days last year
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Independent Minds
Children skipped more than eight million days of school last year as the truancy rate soared, official figures show.
Pupils in primary and secondary schools in England missed 1.03 per cent of half days in the autumn term last year and the spring term this year due to unauthorised absence. This is up from 0.97 per cent for the same two terms in 2007-08.
It means that almost 64,800 pupils skipped school without permission on a typical day through truancy, family holidays, illness and other reasons. In total, 8.2 million days were lost due to unauthorised absence.
The Schools minister Vernon Coaker said that missing schools without a good reason was "totally unacceptable". The most common reason for absence was illness, accounting for 59.2 per cent of cases.
Absence for family holidays was the second biggest reason, accounting for 9.7 per cent of absent half days; of these almost a fifth (18.6 per cent) were not authorised.
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Comments
It could be, of course, that a lot of kids are just totally hacked off with being surrounded by loutish behaviour, class indiscipline, bullies etc and just feel they want no more of this. But Mr Croaker won't even begin to countenance that, oh no.
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 at 11:41 am (UTC)
My youngest child aged 10, who makes his little 'left to its own rural devices' primary school, look good with the academic marks he achieves - is on the point of leaving school to be taught by a private tutor combined with Education Otherwise. East Anglia seems to have a very poor reputation in terms of the way it's institutions behave. Firstly through no fault of his own, he suffers from periods of bad health, apart from the usual flu/viruses etc, things like scarlet fever, pnuemonia, however due to the tiny size of the school and the dreadful head, (one of only two duff candidates for the job), my son has literally been hounded about absence, on his return after illness with all the correct paperwork, he is subjected to overbearing interviews about whether he has been ill or at home with mummy for another reason, making him feel nervous, and as if he has been badly behaved. He has never been in trouble for being badly behaved in a school setting. His reports normally say he is hardworking, helpful and has w good social skills and helps others.
On top of this he has been bullied since reception - the school has done nothing apart from deny it.
When I started to flag up issues of real concern to the education department, including the lack of HPA guidelines being followed for infections in school. The head banned his mother, disabled with three diseases from the local sports day, leaving our son, with no parent to watch - due to father working away with the only salary coming in. We also make journeys by taxi £30 a time to reach modern GP care, all funded ourselves.
Our son has been left traumatized and unable to move to a neighbouring school due to fright about the amount of bullied children who moved over to our school, from that one, plus a GP who struck the whole family off for having scarlet fever, has his wife working there.
We wonder with the accountability for public wages how in one area, two heads of small primary schools off with stress, despite parents asking for help..... no help coming just new heads and others put out of sight on a sickness wage, and this particular head allowed to bend the rules and bully an entire family. Naturally he gets away with it and the education department turn a full blind eye.
Some parts of East Anglia are so off the mark with regard to this behaviour that we hope that a documentary will be made about it's local institutions.
Prior to the arrival of this dysfunctional head, we had a reasonable standard of living. All our children do well at school, but 5 year's of trauma may now ruin this for our bright young son.
The main story is also quite slanted and appears to present the story as delivered in a new release.
If the headline had read 'Every schools pupils only missed one day on average last year', it would have prevented the minister from trotting out his meaningless and ill-informed drivel.