Education Secretary Gillian Keegan
After Education Secretary Gillian Keegan urged that headteachers should drive to the homes of students who are absent from school and pick them up, a teachers' union retaliated.
According to Ms. Keegan, the post-pandemic drop in student attendance is now "a crisis" and headteachers "have a duty" to pick up the students.
When asked how she would handle the 125,000 kids who will miss more classes than they will, she insisted that she would "pick them up myself."
However, Ms. Keegan's "unhelpful" remarks, according to the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), demonstrated "a lack of understanding of how schools operate."
They [headteachers] certainly have a duty, Ms. Keegan stated in a statement to Sky News. Everybody needs to do their share. You may need to text the parent in the morning or visit the home occasionally. You simply have to take action when it is possible.
"We don't want headteachers spending their entire days doing that. But to be honest, it's worth it right now if it helps someone enrol in school. If I could, I'd go pick them up myself.
Although schools have a critical role to play in promoting excellent attendance, James Bowen, assistant general secretary of the school leaders' organisation NAHT, argued that parents are ultimately responsible for making sure their children arrive at school on time.
He informed me that these remarks "are unhelpful and show a worrying lack of understanding of how schools operate."
"It goes without saying that school administrators need to be in their classrooms managing their schools; asking them to drive around the neighbourhood picking up kids is neither practicable nor a smart use of their time.
"Local authority teams were employed by schools for many years to carry out this specific task, but after a decade of cuts, we have seen them largely disappear."
As persistent absence rates rise in the wake of the pandemic, the Children's Commissioner claimed earlier this year that a "huge" proportion of kids are skipping school on Fridays.
Local officials said that in 2021–2022, close to 100,000 kids were completely missing from their classes.
The government interprets this to mean that they are not enrolled in school and are not receiving a decent education elsewhere other than a school.
In England, more than 1.7 million students, or 24.2% of all youngsters, missed 10% or more of their scheduled classes in the autumn of 2022–2023.
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| Education Secretary Gillian Keegan |
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