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The truancy time bomb threatening to blow up Britain's economy
Sam Sheedy thought he'd seen it all. Two decades of working in secondary schools had taught him just how resourceful children can be if they don't want to come to school.
But even he was surprised to discover how determined the truants were at Hanson Academy in Bradford.
By the time Sheedy took over as headteacher in 2023, he'd become used to catching teenagers trying to sneak out behind staff cars at lunchtime or climbing over the school gates.
Hanson even had the benefit of a 7ft perimeter fence that stretched around the campus. But it was no match for the pupils, who started digging tunnels to get out in Shawshank Redemption-style escapes.
During his first week, he walked the grounds, bag of concrete in tow, sealing up all the holes he had discovered. But less than a week later, fresh ones had appeared in their place.
'There were four tunnels under the fence, two were lined with plastic so they didn't get mud on their blazers,' he recalls. 'It was actually ingenious, but completely unsafe.'
The tunnels became emblematic of a school that already had a reputation for bad behaviour and truancy, churning through 20 different headteachers in almost as many years.
'It was the most broken school in the country,' says Andy Barnett, a director at Delta Academies Trust, which runs Hanson alongside more than 50 other schools.
At its worst moment, more than 60pc of Hanson's pupils were absent from school for the equivalent of a day every other week, while one in five were missing half their lessons each week – one of the worst rates in the country.
Sheedy has spent the past two years turning Hanson around. Attendance is climbing, while Ofsted handed the school its first ever 'Good' rating in April.
But years of trouble leave deep scars – and not just at Hanson.
School absence, suspensions and permanent exclusions across the country have soared since lockdown, with children and families becoming not just disengaged from school but society itself.
Department for Education (DfE) data show that in summer 2024, almost 173,000 pupils were absent from school more than they were present, equating to almost 2.5pc of England's total school population.
That's almost three times the number in autumn 2019, before lockdown.
It's a grim portent of the future. The Government's own analysis shows that children who skip school are up to four times more likely to be on benefits in adulthood. Absent pupils are more likely to end up unemployed, use drugs and commit crimes.
Even those that end up in a job are estimated to earn £10,000 less by the time they celebrate their 28th birthday compared to pupils with near-perfect attendance.
'Lost learning isn't just a classroom issue – it's a threat to our economy,' says Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary. 'Every missed school day damages our children's education and future earnings, weakening our future workforce.'
Labour must grip the problem before it metastasises into an economic disaster. Can they defuse this societal time bomb?
'A dangerous place to be'
To understand what must be done, the Education Secretary could do worse than look at what is happening in Bradford.
Sheedy spends a significant chunk of the school day walking the corridors at Hanson. There are 1,547 students enrolled here, and he claims to know most of their names.
Like an approachable drill sergeant, Sheedy monitors behaviour but is also on hand to help. On a recent July school day, he directs a girl to the first aid room after she complains about a swollen eye. A boy comes to tell him about his morning cleaning the gyms.
As friendly as Sheedy can be, he also has a steely side. His voice booms as he rebukes a group of loitering boys: 'Guys, what are you standing still for? Let's get walking!'
Other members of Hanson's senior leadership team patrol the building in hi-vis vests, making sure children are where they need to be.
It's two weeks before the summer holidays and the corridors are packed with students, a very different situation to when Sheedy first arrived.
'At any one point in the day there were 193 children truanting out of a cohort of 1,600,' he says. 'The amount of lost learning time was truly daunting.
'There'd be kids that would come in from other schools and just spend the day roaming around. Children would be going and sitting in local residents' gardens and having parties.
'It was a dangerous place to be, was the reality. Staff didn't want to come out of the classrooms and be in the corridors. It was not under control.'
While Hanson was among the worst in the country for absences, its problems were not unusual. More than one in five children missed the equivalent of one schoolday a fortnight last summer, with 1.6m pupils classed as 'persistently absent'.
That compares with roughly 900,000 before lockdown. Students are now missing an average of 14 days of school per year, up from an average of fewer than nine days in 2019. Unauthorised absence is driving the rise.
Rates of suspension and permanent exclusion have also continued to climb. Almost 11,000 children were permanently excluded from England's state schools last year. This is up 16pc from the previous year, with 'persistent disruptive behaviour' cited as the most common reason.
In addition, official data show that there were 955,000 suspensions in the 2023-24 academic year, up by more than a fifth compared with a year earlier.
The figures show almost 7,000 suspensions and 70 permanent exclusions were handed to pupils aged 'four and under' in the 2023-24 school year, more than three times pre-Covid levels.
In short, children are behaving worse than they were before the pandemic and skipping school altogether far more often.
Kiran Gill, chief executive of charity the Difference, blames lockdown.
'Work and school really changed during the pandemic, and that has changed people's feelings about them,' she says. 'Lots of young people – particularly small children – lost out on the social and emotional development of being in groups. And as a result, there is a lot of catching up to do.
'There's also a mistrust that's grown between parents and schools. School had been a constant in everybody's life, and there was a breaking of that taboo of not turning up. That mistrust, I think, is part of what's playing out today.'
Phillipson has described the school absence 'epidemic' as the symptom of a 'failure of society and state', blaming a breakdown of the 'precious relationship' between schools, families and communities for plummeting attendance.
'The absence epidemic is the canary in the coal mine for belonging in our country,' she warned last year.
Phillipson has warned of a 'casual' attitude towards attendance on Fridays, when many parents work from home. Ofsted has also said parents working from home since the pandemic has fuelled an increase in Friday truancy.
'I've made attendance a priority, and we've already made huge strides getting children back in the classroom with over 3m additional school days gained this year,' Phillipson says.
Progress, yes, but Sheedy believes the problems run deeper.
He says: 'Parents, carers, families and in reality some communities do not see education as that valuable because it didn't work for them. As a result of that, they think, 'well, school was a horrible experience for me, why am I going to force my kid to go when they don't want to?'
'That perpetuates throughout the rest of their lives because they turn up to a job and they can't pick up the skills because they haven't got the learning habits.'
Life on benefits
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has estimated that the total lifetime cost of exclusion is around £370,000 per young person when you count the cost of education, benefits, healthcare and criminal justice.
Policymakers and think tanks are increasingly drawing on an official database of employment outcomes for 39m people to figure out the impact of missing lessons.
The Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data shows pupils classified as 'persistently absent', with more than 10pc of lessons missed, were 2.7 times more likely to be claiming benefits in adulthood than pupils with a good attendance record. This rises to 4.2 times for pupils missing more than half the school year.
The DfE also found persistently absent pupils were 60pc less likely to be able to hold down a job for a year or more. For pupils who miss more than 50pc of lessons, the likelihood of maintaining steady employment decreases by 75pc.
There are many more similarly depressing stats. The Educational Policy Institute (EPI) shows that children who have been suspended from school just once are almost twice as likely to be claiming out of work or health benefits by the time they reach 24.
Many of these children will go on to be suspended repeatedly. Get more than 10 suspensions and they are five times more likely to be on welfare in adulthood.
Many of these payments do not require people to look for work, condemning many to a life on benefits.
Those who do find a job will still pay the price for their absences. A DfE study published this year found 15 and 16-year-olds who missed half their lessons earned on average £21,000 less than those who were hardly absent by the time they were 28.
The crisis in schools risks making the youth worklessness crisis worse at a time when close to 1m young people are already not in employment, education nor training (Neet).
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) estimates around 190,000 pupils will become Neets this parliament as a result of persistent absence, almost twice as many more than if absence rates had returned to pre-pandemic levels. The think tank believes this could ultimately cost the taxpayer £14bn.
Andy Cook, chief executive of the CSJ, says the surge in school absence has devastating consequences for the future.
'The Covid lockdowns broke the contract of trust between schools and parents, but the danger now is that absence is becoming entrenched as 'the norm',' he says. 'That isn't good enough.
'The consequences of so many kids missing so much school will only result in unfulfilled lives, fractured communities and spiralling costs to the taxpayer for picking up the pieces.'
A flagship report by the CSJ last year warned pandemic lockdowns had a 'catastrophic effect' on the nation's social fabric, with communities across the country left more isolated.
Cases of mental health problems among young people went from one in nine to nearly a quarter among the oldest children. Across the UK, 86pc more people sought help for addictions. Prisoners were locked up for as much as 22.5 hours a day.
Studies also show the stark relationship between school absence and crime. CSJ analysis shows that persistently absent pupils are more than three times as likely to commit an offence by the time they reach their 17th birthday than pupils fully attending school.
'Fraying' social contract
When Sheedy arrived at Hanson, he brought a firm hand to the school.
After pupils made a makeshift bridge out of a tree by leaning it over the perimeter fence, he cut the tree down. 'We got a chainsaw,' he says.
But getting tough with children will not go far in tackling the problem of poor attendance and outcomes, he says.
'Ultimately, you have to develop a positive relationship with the community you serve,' he says. 'If all you're going to do with a severely absent child is say 'you need to turn up otherwise you're going to get a consequence', they just won't turn up or they will turn up and cause problems.'
The headteacher has sought to build positive relationships with his students and find ways to make them want to come to school, rather than force them to. This includes offering gardening lessons for those who are interested.
'I enjoy school now,' says one student. 'I want to come in because I want to finish my garden.'
Sheedy has also worked hard to ensure pupils have no excuse to turn back when they reach the school gate.
Hanson made headlines in 2014 when the former headteacher suspended 150 pupils for not having the right uniform. Sheedy now has a room full of Hanson-branded jackets and trousers hanging on racks. The school also spent £340,000 on a new perimeter fence, meaning they could cut the £110,000-a-year they were spending on security guards.
Staff here have access to an array of data on their pupils. A green dot means that child made it into school today, while a red one signals the opposite.
Moira Wallace, who used to run the Social Exclusion Unit set up by Tony Blair in 1997, says DfE's data drive is making a huge difference to attendance and outcomes.
Wallace, now a fellow at the Institute for Government, says: 'The department is now giving schools really useful data to help them prevent absence – for example, sharing with secondary schools the attendance data of the Year Six children who will come to them in the autumn.
'That transition is where many children who are already a bit absent deteriorate further. Schools really welcome this, because it gives them the opportunity to talk to feeder schools about the background and put special effort into supporting and engaging children who might be at risk of poor attendance.'
Cook, at the CSJ, says action to tackle the mounting issues facing Britain must start in the classroom. By the time young people join the dole queue, it is often too late.
He says: 'The social contract in this country is fraying, and as parents we must step up to do our bit. Attendance is not optional, getting children to school is the first step in giving them a future.'
In the space of just one academic year, Sheedy has managed to halve the number of severe absentees missing more than half their lessons, cutting it from one in five to one in eight. The number of unauthorised absences is down by a third.
He recognises there is still much more work to do, with a significant share of pupils still missing at least half a day of school a week. But rising attendance is already leading to better results and Sheedy beams as he boasts of overtaking other schools in the local area in terms of attainment.
It is important to get back to basics, he says.
'You have to make sure that you've got a calm and orderly building. We've got 22 children who are visually impaired. Five years ago, those children didn't leave the provision they had upstairs, whereas now they're integrated into lessons and down in the canteen eating their lunch, which was just not an option before.
'Imagine sitting there minding your business, and a cheeseburger just flies into the back of your head.'
Hanson, once one of the worst in the country for attendance, now welcomes headteachers from across the UK who want to learn how to keep children coming to class.
It's a remarkable turnaround, but just one of many required to save Britain from a future crisis.
