The head of a social mobility charity has blamed the culture of working from home for the alarming rise in the number of children missing school.
Sir Peter Lampl, the founder of the Sutton Trust, said school closures during lockdown led to a breakdown of the “social contract” in which parents had insisted their children attend lessons.
He said that the rising absence rate was a “disaster in waiting” and that the country needed to look at how the shift to working from home had affected the obligation parents felt about getting their children to school.
There has been a rise in school absences since the Covid-19 pandemic, with record numbers of pupils severely absent and missing at least half their lessons. Statistics from the Department for Education show that in the spring term of this year 140,000 pupils were severely absent. One child in five missed at least one day a fortnight.
Lampl, a former private equity boss, said that since setting up the Sutton Trust to improve social mobility 26 years ago, “nothing I have seen has concerned me as gravely as the current crisis in school attendance”.
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He continued: “We need to look at working from home — and to have an honest conversation about how the ease of moving your working day from the office to your kitchen table has, inevitably, affected the obligation parents feel about getting their kids to go to school. There’s no ignoring the link.
“We must look at ways to get more workers back into offices and, by extension, encourage them to reappraise their commitment to getting their children into school. School closures during lockdown have undermined the social contract that saw parents insist that their kids made it into the classroom except when they genuinely couldn’t.”
The rise in mental health problems among young people and the cost of living crisis exacerbated the problem, he added. “When parents can’t figure out where the next meal is coming from, ensuring that their children make it to the school gates is the slighter priority. Certainly, it is harder to make the case that a missed day here and there really matters when not long ago schools were shuttered for six months.”
He called on the government to rebuild services. “Years of austerity have seen school-home support officers, family officers and related services cut to the bone. They need to be restored.”
