Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson (Image: Getty)
Schools are in the grip of “an absence crisis” as pupils who stayed at home during the pandemic continue to avoid classrooms, Bridget Phillipson has warned.
The Education Secretary said: “We need to know where these children are.”
She added that high absence levels are just part of the damage lockdown is continuing to do to the nation’s pupils, with school results also down.
The Government has set out plans to get children back into school by introducing an official register of all children so local councils know who is being homeschooled and who is absent.
No such list exists at the moment, even though it is a legal requirement for all children to receive an education.
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More than 1.4million pupils – nearly one in five – were “persistently absent” in England last year, which means they missed at least one in 10 of all school sessions.
That was nearly double the 743,308 pupils who were persistently absent in the 2018-19 school year, before the pandemic.
Ms Phillipson said lockdowns had been a shock to schools, adding: “Recovery has been too slow
“Average attainment is down. The gap for disadvantaged children has opened up.
“And we have an absence crisis with more than one in five children missing a day at school each fortnight, fuelled by fewer and fewer children feeling that they belong in school. This needs to change.”
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She admitted the Department for Education and local authorities did not know why many children were missing.
“There are too many children where we don’t have visibility as to what’s going on in their lives,” she said.
Ministers hope the new register will also ensure more children are protected from abuse.
Some parents who educate their children at home have raised concerns they will be adversely affected, but Ms Phillipson insisted the measure will not prevent genuine homeschooling.
MPs on the House of Commons Education Committee also challenged Ms Phillipson over the Government’s decision to apply VAT to private school fees, which came into effect earlier this month.
Caroline Johnson, Conservative MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham, asked whether the Education Secretary was concerned by reports that children have had to move from private to state schools during exam years because of the policy.
“We believe the impact to be minimal,” Ms Phillipson told MPs.
She added: “I would hope and expect that schools in those situations will be seeking to bear down on costs to parents to make sure that they are available to their communities that they wish to serve.
“But their fees have gone up year on year, way beyond inflation, and they have, frankly, priced themselves out of the market for lots of middle-class parents.”