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The Shadow education secretary takes aim at absenteeism as a poll reveals that one in four parents don’t think their child has to go to school each day.
Bridget Phillipson understands only too well the transformative power of education. She grew up in a council house in Washington, a former mining town between Sunderland and Newcastle.
The shadow education secretary, 40, whose father left when her mother Clare was pregnant with her, was bullied at primary school and ostracised because her family was so poor. They were reliant on benefits and their terraced house, with rotten window frames and no upstairs heating, sat between a disused railway line and an industrial wasteland. In the winter she would go to bed fully clothed. But she did not miss a day of school.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t have it easy, but my family valued and prioritised education,” she said. “That means you can thrive, you can achieve all that you’re capable of achieving.”
This week she will draw on this background, deeply unusual in Westminster, to speak out on school attendance and implicitly criticise the culture of lockdown, which she believes harmed many young lives.
Phillipson attended St Robert of Newminster Catholic School in Washington, where she was a star pupil, and read modern history at Hertford College, Oxford, graduating in 2005. She worked in local government and at a domestic abuse charity before being elected the Labour MP for Houghton and Sunderland South in 2010.
“The brilliant local schools I went to changed my life,” Phillipson said. “I know I’m incredibly fortunate and I want all young people to have that range of options available to them, so they can find the right path for them.”
“We didn’t always have a lot of money. At times, it was pretty tough for my mum, bringing me up on her own, but I went to school every day and it was incredibly important for my family that education was valued.”
According to official data, the proportion of pupils classed as persistently absent and missing more than one in ten lessons has more than doubled in England since the start of the pandemic. It has risen from 10.9 per cent in 2018-19 to 22.3 per cent in 2022-23. Last year, a record 399,000 parents were given a penalty notice by local authorities for their children’s unauthorised school absences. The number of fines issued in 2022-23 was 20 per cent higher than in 2018-19 and equates to a fine for one in 20 pupils aged from five to 16 at state schools.
Now a YouGov poll commissioned by the centre-right think tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) reveals that more than a quarter of parents – 28 per cent – agree that the pandemic showed it was not essential for children to attend school every day. Both Phillipson and her Tory counterpart, Gillian Keegan, will publicly address the attendance deficit in the coming days.
In the YouGov poll – of 1,206 parents of children aged between five and 16 in primary or secondary school – only a quarter (26 per cent) said their children’s school communicated well with them. More than a third (35 per cent) said they were worried about their child’s performance and would like more support from school, rising to 42 per cent among low-income households; 18 per cent were worried about their child’s attendance and would like more support, rising to 24 per cent among low-income households.
Andy Cook, the CSJ chief executive, said: “The Covid lockdowns have broken the contract of trust between schools and parents and we need to repair it as a matter of extreme urgency. 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.”
Keegan, the education secretary, will launch a campaign on Monday to tackle England’s school attendance crisis. It will include a £15 million programme pioneered by the children’s charity Barnardo’s to give 3,600 struggling pupils a mentor to find out why they are not in class. She has reminded parents they have a “legal duty” to send children with minor mental or physical illnesses, such as anxiety or a cough, to school.
Keegan will expand a programme that gives children skipping school an attendance mentor who could drive or walk youngsters from their home to school in the morning or negotiate with head teachers on their behalf. She said: “Persistent absence is a hangover from the pandemic affecting schools around the world. Schools and the government cannot do this alone.
“Families play a big part in attendance and parents have a legal duty to make sure their children are at school. I know it can be hard to get children out of the door, especially when they are feeling a bit anxious or have a mild cough or cold, so we must rebuild the social contract between parents and schools and make sure everyone plays their part.”
Ahead of a speech to the CSJ on Tuesday, Phillipson, who is married with two children, said parents must ensure their children attend school or risk them becoming part of a lost Covid generation.
“It’s deeply troubling that we’ve ended up with a really terrible crisis around persistent absenteeism in our schools,” she said. “It’s a really big concern that, increasingly, parents have quite a relaxed attitude to children’s attendance at school. I’m not squeamish about talking about the importance of parental responsibility. Of course, government has got a role to play, too, and a Labour government will make sure that parents have got the support they need. But parents have responsibilities too.
“If I were secretary of state, I’d be sending a very clear message to parents that every day at school matters, and that irresponsible parents who don’t care about sending their kids to school are harming other kids’ life chances, not just their own.”
She said a Labour government would set up mental health clubs in every area, mental health counsellors in secondary schools and free breakfast clubs in primary schools. A Labour government, Phillipson said, would place more emphasis on absenteeism as part of the Ofsted inspection framework, with schools compelled to produce an annual report on attendance, off-rolling (removing a pupil without using a permanent exclusion) and safeguarding. Schools are required to submit weekly attendance records to the Department for Education but absenteeism does not have its own Ofsted criteria, instead falling under a broader category of “behaviour and attitudes”.
These reports would affect the Ofsted rating given to schools, which would also take into account the progress they have made in shrinking the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers. The Education Policy Institute revealed last year that disadvantaged primary schoolchildren suffered a fall in attainment levels since the pandemic and are on average 12.3 months behind in reading compared to their more affluent peers.
Phillipson says the pandemic cast a “very long shadow over children’s life chances” and now believes the government failed to prioritise getting children back into the classroom after the two lockdowns. Schools closed in March 2020 then reopened full-time for secondary pupils in September. However, the following January they were shut again, a move backed by teaching unions, and did not reopen until March 2021.
Sir Keir Starmer backed both closures and urged Boris Johnson to impose the second, more controversial one, saying it was “now inevitable”, in order to get the virus under control.
In a veiled criticism of the 2021 consensus position, Phillipson said that in another pandemic her party would prioritise keeping schools open. She said: “The initial decisions that were taken at the start of the pandemic were incredibly tough, including for the ministers taking them. They were facing the context of a new and terrifying pandemic, where it was far from clear what the outcomes would be in the long run. But as time drew on, we saw a real failure to prioritise getting children back into education.
“It’s just too damaging to children’s life chances to experience that level of disruption to their education. It’s had a massively detrimental impact on children and young people, and there was a real failure on the part of the government to prioritise getting children back into school quickly. That is making it tough now to get children back into school on a regular basis.”
Phillipson parried the question of relations with the teaching unions, which also backed lockdowns, saying there needed to be a “fresh approach from government”. Union members walked out over pay post-pandemic but accepted a 6.5 per cent offer last summer.
“Increasingly, the teachers that they represent and the school staff feel beleaguered, feel let-down, feel not listened to, and that has to change,” she said. “If we are to deliver high and rising standards in our schools, then we have to make sure it’s done in partnership with the people working within education. But my priority will always be children and young people.”
She blames Rishi Sunak for the failure to deliver a proper post-pandemic recovery plan. As chancellor, he was criticised for blocking a £15 billion package put forward by Sir Kevan Collins, the education expert appointed by the government to advise on how to help children recover from the disruption. Phillipson said: “It makes me incredibly angry to think that children’s life chances were so casually disregarded by a now-prime minister who regards this as a matter for other people’s children, who doesn’t have the same stake in the system and is leading to millions of children across our country being failed.”
She added: “At the moment, one in five children are persistently absent from school, and that’s likely to increase to one in four, which is a shockingly high number.”
However, Phillipson admitted that she could not assign any extra funding for schools beyond the pledge to add VAT to private school fees to fund breakfast clubs. Labour will ditch Sunak’s policy of forcing pupils to study maths to 18 and instead focus on primary school provision. The party is also likely to shelve his plan to replace A-levels with a new single Advanced British Standard qualification.
Labour could also re-examine the controversial decision by Tony Blair to take languages off the core curriculum. But Phillipson said: “One of the biggest challenges that we’re facing at the minute is around recruitment, particularly of specialist teachers, but also support staff, which means that schools are struggling to deliver on current expectations. Tackling that recruitment crisis will have to be a big priority if we win the election.’’