A crisis of [dis]connection: rethinking school attendance in the UK.
- Euan
- Jul 24
- 10 min read
The stimulus for this newsletter edition came from the recent Education Select Committee meeting discussing school attendance, and also a Linkedin post from Euan, founder of &Parents, which drove a discussion around the topic. Read more on the importance of connection in getting families reconnected with education, below.
Defiance or disconnection?
A recent reflection on a UK Education Committee hearing posed a provocative question: what if low school attendance isn’t about defiance or disinterest at all, but about disconnection? The discussion revealed a troubling truth: the relationship between schools and families is fraying, and current policy might be making it worse. In many cases, as participants noted, “schools don’t feel backed-up by parents” and “parents don’t trust schools’ judgment”, with families feeling that their “complex situations are [not] being fully understood.” Instead of simple truancy, low attendance often signals deeper struggles – a breakdown in trust and communication between home and school. The focus has too often been on surface data (attendance rates, unauthorised absences, persistent absenteeism) when behind every statistic is a child and family facing challenges that a register or fine alone cannot capture. One committee witness bluntly described the torrent of fines for non-attendance as “more punitive than anything else,” noting many penalties remain unpaid long past their deadline. What if we have misdiagnosed the problem – treating absenteeism as a compliance issue, when it is fundamentally a crisis of connection?
To understand this, consider what’s behind the attendance figures. Every day, teachers mark registers that feed national databases – yet those numbers say little about why a child is missing school. Often it’s not a matter of laziness at all, but of life circumstances and unmet needs. Families in temporary accommodation, children serving as young carers, pupils with chronic medical or mental health conditions, households in poverty or upheaval due to domestic abuse – these are the hidden stories behind the absences. Many parents themselves are dealing with insecure work, eviction threats or mental ill health. Every child and every family has an individual story, yet too often they are treated as a statistic. Is it any wonder that punitive approaches fall flat when so many absences stem from hardship and anxiety rather than wilful defiance? As one education advocate put it, “Every child and every family deserves to be treated as an individual, not a statistic.” School attendance, in short, is not about enforcement – it is about relationships. And right now, many of those relationships are strained or broken.
Policy in the spotlight – The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
This fraying trust between parents and schools is unfolding against the backdrop of significant policy change. The UK government has introduced the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill (2024–25), a wide-ranging reform that explicitly aims to “better protect children and raise standards in education”. Crucially, the Bill’s focus is on making sure “no child falls through gaps between different services” and that “families can get help when they need it”. In essence, it seeks to bridge the silos between schools, social care, health and other services. This is an acknowledgment that issues like persistent absence are often symptoms of wider welfare concerns. The Bill includes measures to improve safeguarding and join up support: for example, it will pilot a single unique identifier number for each child across agencies (much like an NHS number) to help professionals share information and spot children who need extra help. It strengthens the role of education in safeguarding by giving teachers a greater voice alongside local authorities, police and health services. It also doubles investment in Family Help services to £500m, aiming to support families dealing with challenges such as mental health issues or risk of children entering care.
Significantly, the Bill tackles school attendance more directly as well. It introduces a register of children not in school, requiring families who home educate or otherwise educate outside mainstream schools to inform local authorities. This long-debated measure is designed to ensure “no child slips through the cracks” – so that children who are out of school (for instance, due to anxiety or exclusion) are known and can be offered support. Local authorities will even gain powers to require a child’s return to school if home education is deemed unsuitable, particularly where a child is subject to safeguarding concerns. These steps reflect a support-first approach in rhetoric: ministers say they want schools and councils “to work closely with families to identify and address the underlying issues” behind poor attendance. In practice, however, critics worry that the Bill and accompanying guidance still lean towards tough compliance. For example, soon all schools must share attendance data daily with the Department for Education, enabling closer monitoring. And notably, financial penalties for truancy have been hiked for the first time in a decade – parents now face a fine of £160 (up from £120) for unauthorised absence. Last year, an astonishing 443,000 such penalty notices were issued to parents in England. This raises a pressing question: Will tighter laws and bigger fines actually solve the attendance crisis, or do they risk deepening the rift between families and schools? Even officials concede that fines are at best a blunt deterrent. As one council director told MPs, most schools “are not using fines for persistently absent children”; instead they spend “huge amounts of resource and energy” trying to re-engage those students. The impact of the new measures, good intentions aside, will depend on whether they truly prioritise understanding over punishment.
Parents as partners – history, challenges and new voices
The uneasy dynamic between UK schools and parents isn’t new. For decades, education policy has oscillated on how much say and support families have. Since the 1980s, parents have had formal roles as school governors and in Parent Teacher Associations, recognising that parent engagement is vital for student success. Yet the reality for many families – especially those with children in difficulty – has often been one of struggle and advocacy rather than partnership. Parents of children with special educational needs (SEN) or mental health challenges frequently recount battles for support: fighting to get diagnoses, appropriate accommodations, or simply to have their child’s struggles taken seriously. Historically, some schools viewed persistent absence or “school refusal” through a lens of discipline, assuming the fault lay with poor parenting or a child’s lack of will. This has bred resentment on both sides. How often have parents been dismissed as over-anxious or irresponsible, while they see the school as unlistening or even harmful to their child? The Education Committee hearing underscored this mistrust: schools feeling undermined by parents, and parents feeling judged or ignored by schools.
In recent years, a growing movement of parents and allies has been pushing to change this narrative. Organisations like Square Peg (a parent-led community interest company founded in 2019) and the affiliated network Not Fine in School have given voice to families whose children face barriers to attendance. Tellingly, Square Peg deliberately avoids the term “school refusal,” instead talking about “barriers to school attendance”. This shift in language is powerful: it rejects the notion that a child chooses to reject school out of willfulness or “poor behaviour,” and instead asks what obstacles are preventing the child from attending. The founders explain, many children who won’t go to school are “masking and withdrawing” due to severe anxiety or unmet special needs and not the “fault” in the child or parent at all. In fact, clinical anxiety and mental health conditions can make the school environment “completely debilitating” for some children. These parent advocates argue that current systems are far more punitive than supportive. In a 2021 testimony, schools “often [demonstrated] hostile response[s] and lack of patience and flexibility” which “only serves to exacerbate the problem”. Parents facing persistent absence frequently feel blamed or even criminalised, when they are actually desperate for help. “The current attendance policy and absence codes were never designed for long-term absences with no clear understanding of underlying need,”. What if, instead of assuming parents are “just not doing enough” to get a child to school, we started assuming they’ve likely tried everything and need empathy and support?
There is, however, hope in examples of collaboration. Some schools and local authorities have begun to treat persistent absence less like a truancy problem and more like a safeguarding or wellbeing issue. An Ofsted inspector told MPs that in schools with good attendance, leaders focus on “culture and communication with families”, never give up on individual students, and notice early when a child’s attendance starts to dip, intervening supportively. In these schools, attendance is treated “like safeguarding… everybody’s business all the time”. That ethos – that every absence has a reason and merits a conversation – can transform outcomes. For instance, one headteacher, of a secondary school in Salford, has moved away completely from the idea that absent pupils have parents “swinging the lead” (aka skiving off). He insists it’s wrong to vilify parents when “the vast majority of severe absences [involve] families who were really struggling”, often due to poverty or other adversities. At their school, instead of threatening calls, a therapist and safeguarding team work to understand what’s causing a child distress about school and address those issues. They offer practical help – a quiet space for overwhelmed pupils, flexibility around the timetable, simple gestures like personally greeting a young carer each morning so she “feels seen”. As a result of this compassionate approach, that pupil’s attendance rose from very low to over 80%, and the school’s overall attendance for disadvantaged and SEN pupils is above national average. Such stories prove that trust and understanding, not pressure or blame, are what get young people back into class. Yet, as school leaders have warned, mounting pressure from government for quick fixes is making it harder for schools to take this “gentler approach”. The push to “double down on stressed kids with greater robustness and rigour” “absurd”, given it’s precisely stress and fear driving many children away.
Parents themselves are also stepping up as advocates and collaborators in new ways. The rise of advocacy groups indicates that parents are no longer suffering in silence. They are organising, sharing resources, and campaigning for change. Membership has skyrocketed since the government issued “strict new guidelines” on enforcing attendance, which included higher fines and aggressive prosecution threats. This surge reflects thousands of families “fighting against a toxic, coercive attendance drive”. Parents are telling stories of extreme measures: community police officers sent to knock on doors, highly anxious children hiding from truant officers, and pupils being told “if you don’t come in, your mum or dad will go to prison”. One can only imagine the terror such tactics instill and it only increases their fear of school. These accounts have catalysed a public conversation about the ethics and efficacy of our attendance enforcement. Should any child’s school day begin with the sound of police at the door? The emerging consensus among many parents, educators and even some MPs is that we must re-center on children’s wellbeing. As one mother (and well-known actor) Anna Maxwell Martin bluntly put it, the fines and hardline measures feel “cruel, idiotic”. The question now is whether policymakers will heed these voices and pivot accordingly.
Challenging the status quo – questions for reflection
Throughout this debate, a series of critical questions hangs in the air, challenging us to think differently about education priorities and assumptions:
What if attendance strategies focused first on listening – truly listening – and actually understanding families’ situations, rather than on punishing them? Instead of asking “how do we enforce the rules?” should we be asking “why is this child struggling to attend, and how can we help?”
What if policy created the space (and time and resources) for schools to build relational capacity, not just compliance systems? In other words, how might we reward schools for strengthening trust with families – through home visits, counselling, flexible schooling options – rather than primarily measuring absence rates and issuing penalties?
Is a child’s presence in class being valued more than the child’s overall wellbeing? Put differently, are we at risk of winning the battle (getting a child through the door) but losing the war (their mental health and love of learning)?
How can schools and parents rebuild trust when each feels misunderstood by the other? What would it take – in training, in school culture, in parent outreach – to move from finger-pointing to problem-solving together?
These questions do not have easy answers, but they demand our attention. They flip the script from blame to curiosity and from short-term fixes to long-term relationships.
A call to reconnect.
Ultimately, solving the attendance crisis is not about tweaking codes or increasing penalties; it’s about rebuilding connection at every level. Policymakers, educators, and parents each have a role to play. The new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill offers an opening: its very name signals that children’s welfare and school cannot be separated. But legislation alone cannot mandate trust. Trust is earned through consistency, empathy, and action on the ground. As a community of parents and educators, we must push beyond treating attendance as a box-ticking exercise and instead treat it as a barometer of child wellbeing. This means celebrating schools that take creative, compassionate steps to include every child, even when life makes attendance hard. It means holding government to its promise of a “support-first” approach, ensuring that funding and policy guidance actually back holistic support for families, rather than issuing ultimatums. It also means parents must engage, not in opposition to schools, but as partners. Speaking up when something isn’t working, sharing honestly with teachers about children’s needs, and yes, also reflecting on what we can do at home to support children’s readiness for school.
Every parent (who may also be a teacher) reading this can likely recall a moment when a teacher or school leader showed understanding toward their child, and how that single act of kindness or flexibility made all the difference. Those moments need to become the norm, not the exception. Likewise, every educator can recall a parent who, when truly heard, became the school’s strongest ally in helping a child thrive. We need to multiply those experiences. What if we stopped seeing attendance as a daily verdict on “good” or “bad” parents/students, and started seeing it as a shared journey to keep children engaged, healthy and safe? If we can do that, the data (improved attendance, achievement, wellbeing) will follow naturally.
In the end, the system doesn’t lack data; it lacks connection. The path forward is about reconnection. Reconnecting policy with the lived realities of families. Reconnecting schools with communities. Reconnecting every child with a sense of belonging in education. That reconnection won’t happen overnight. Trust has to be rebuilt slowly, consistently, locally, and it must start now. As the Education Committee session reminded us, “trust can’t be mandated”, but it can be cultivated. Let this be the moment we stop treating school attendance as a mere legal requirement and start treating it as the collective responsibility of a caring society.
Every child deserves no less.
"A crisis of [dis]connection: rethinking school attendance in the UK."
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References:
Department for Education (2024). Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill – Policy Summary. Gov.uk – Policy paper (18 Dec 2024, updated 21 Mar 2025).gov.uk
House of Commons Library (Long, Roberts, et al., 2025). Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2024-25 (Research Briefing, 03 Jan 2025).commonslibrary.parliament.uk
Tes Magazine (Turner, C., 22 July 2025). “Absence fines are ‘Dickensian’, MPs told.” Summary of Commons Education Committee session on attendance.tes.comtes.com
The Guardian / Observer (Fazackerley, A., 19 May 2024). “Schools in England send police to homes of absent pupils… ‘Heavy-handed’ crackdown ignores underlying reasons.”theguardian.comtheguardian.com
Whole School SEND (Square Peg, 2021). “Please can we banish the term ‘school refusal’?” (Blog post, 03 Feb 2021).wholeschoolsend.org.ukwholeschoolsend.org.uk
Square Peg (Team Square Peg CIC, 2023). Campaign data on school absence (Government data November 2023).teamsquarepeg.co.ukteamsquarepeg.co.uk
Square Peg (2023). “3 Asks” campaign for attendance reform (Square Peg CIC, in partnership with Not Fine in School).teamsquarepeg.co.ukteamsquarepeg.co.uk