Voices of the Missing Children?

“SCHOOL’S OUT FOR SUMMER!” One of my nieces informed her Facebook friends a week ago: “10 week summer holiday we’re ready for you!”

By coincidence, I read this the same week I learnt of Government plans to remove discretion from schools and Local Authorities and insist on fines for parents whose children are absent from, or late for, school. And it was also the week the office of the Children’s Commissioner for England (CCE) released the report “Voices of England’s Missing Children”, with which the CCE launched what she called “A national mission, for every child”: the mission of ensuring 100% attendance in English schools.

At first sight, Dame Rachel (the CCE) and Secretary of State (SoS) Nadhim Zahawi, seem to be in opposition. Zahawi’s proposals are currently out for consultation (closing date July 29) but the preamble assures us that, following an earlier consultation “the Secretary of State committed to introduce a new national framework for the use of legal interventions for absence”. The present consultation is about “thresholds for legal intervention” not whether it happens at all: the Government has already decided both to enforce school attendance by fines and prosecutions and to bypass schools and headteachers – who clearly cannot be trusted. All schools will be required to use electronic registers which are to be monitored by the Department for Education.

The CCE, by contrast, seems to take a softer approach, at least to a point. She reports children and their families questioning the usefulness of rewards and fines for attendance and, specifically discussing the problems faced by young carers, she has this to say: “Attendance policies need to be implemented flexibly where a child is a young carer or has additional responsibilities. Receiving detentions for being late due to caring responsibilities doesn’t support young carers to attend school more promptly but rather creates barriers between the school and the child.” That does not sit well with Mr Zahawi’s automatic fines and no discretion for schools, though unfortunately the Children’s Commissioner does not follow through and advocate the dropping of punitive measures.

I have written on these topics before. As I pointed out 2 years ago, the policy of fining parents for their children not being in school is ill-conceived, discriminatory and just plain wrong. Despite looking hard, I am aware of no evidence that banning term time holidays raises standards, but I have seen evidence (some of which is explained in my earlier blog) that it could depress them. Meanwhile, parents of children whose absence from school is not due to a holiday but to attitude, or just the day to day struggle of life, need support and encouragement not fines and the threat of prison, sanctions which in any case seem to have limited effect.

In 2 blogs written in February this year I identified hundreds of thousands of children who miss out on school. 3,000 pupils with SEND who have no educational provision at all and thousands hidden in the figures for “Elective” Home Education were discussed in the first of these blogs. My second blog highlighted those off-rolled, Children in Care, refugees, and the hundreds of thousands of children who are out of school following eviction from their homes. What all of these have in common is that their absence from school is a direct result of Government policy; “Voices of England’s Missing Children” gives no voice to any of them.

The report does point out that in many cases Local Authorities (LAs) do not even know which children are living in their area and mentions in passing: “those who have been trafficked into the country, those in families who have migrated illegally, children in families who are classed as ‘no recourse to public funds’, and those living with families who do not want their children known to the system,” but in the main its message is that pupil absence is the family’s fault; a stance which leads almost inevitably to punitive sanctions.

How does all this link to my niece’s Facebook post? Well, her children’s school is not in this country and her talk of “10 week summer holidays” serves to remind us all that there is nothing magic about 190 days. A much shorter school year is the practice in many countries, including Ireland, Italy and Spain in Europe, as well as the United States of America where a summer break of three and a half months is the norm. Even in the UK many of our private schools enjoy success with far fewer days in school than are mandated for state schools – leading to the iniquitous situation that the richest families have the freedom to take their holidays at the cheapest prices while the poorest cannot afford any kind of holiday. (Fun fact: Our Prime Minister Mr Johnson, Secretary of State Mr Zahawi and every minister at the DfE bar one went to a private school.)

Attendance is important, of course it is, but educational success is not a factor of the number of days a child spends in school. Family income is the biggest single predictor of whether a child will go on to do well. Sadly, it’s easier for Mr Zahawi to fine parents than for his Government to tackle child poverty, just as it was easier for Dame Rachel to call for schools to “obsess about attendance” than to challenge the Government policies which keep children out of school.

The answer to educational under-achievement is not fining parents. Parents are not the problem.

Dame Rachel and The Missing Children (Part 2)

Carlita, Year 5, was lucky. One afternoon she came home from school to find all her possessions on the pavement. (Carlita is not her real name.) The next day her teacher, who did not know the situation, kept her in at break time to do the homework she had missed, but unlike thousands of other children in her situation Carlita continued to attend school without missing a beat.

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has launched an enquiry to find out what’s happened to 80,000 – 100,000 “children who have ‘fallen off the radar’ and not returned to the classroom after lockdown.” The implication is that children missing school is a new phenomenon and is the parents’ or childrens’ choice. In reality, as we saw last week, the problem is far bigger than Dame Rachel pretends and is overwhelmingly the fault of unwelcoming schools and academy chains.

For many youngsters the trauma of eviction – being abruptly removed from familiar surroundings, friends and home comforts – is also the start of an extended period out of school. Notoriously, this is the case for thousands of Looked After Children, a shameful scandal I wrote about two years ago. In 2019 two reports were published about the experience of children in care, No Place At Home from the Children’s Society and Pass The Parcel from the then Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield.

Between them these reports told us of 40% of Looked After Children accommodated outside their home area (around 30,000 children) some of whom spoke “casually… about moving home 10, 11 or even 15 times (numbers which we know can go much higher). We found that over half of children placed out of area have 2 or more moves within 2 years.” And one consequence of this is: “The children and young people that we spoke to often mentioned that their education had been disrupted due to their placement moves…  One young person who had been in out of area placements for over two years told us that she had only spent two weeks of this time in mainstream education”.

Many of the 200,000 homeless children in temporary accommodation are also accommodated out of area, moved several times and find their education severely disrupted. The biggest difference is that homeless children are not normally taken away from parents. In addition, while Looked after Children can be in Local Authority care for a decade or more, homelessness does not usually last so long, though it does affect huge numbers of children.

Today’s figure of 200,000 homeless children is a 48% increase over 2019’s 135,000 and many of this year’s homeless will be different children from those in 2019 and 2023, so the issue will affect well over a million of our present generation of schoolchildren. I can find no figures and no proper research into how many of these children miss out big time on school. Some Local Authorities will handle this better than others, and some schools are truly welcoming to new arrivals, but my experience, and the experiences of children I have taught, suggest that for the large majority being rendered homeless will cause them to lose significant swathes of their education before they reach 16.

 (The figures for homeless children are calculated by Shelter and apply to Great Britain: England, Scotland and Wales. Shelter’s report in 2019 showed that England has 86.7% of Great Britain’s population but 93.7% of its homeless children.)

The reason moving around the country means that children miss out on school is succinctly explained by UNICEF in a 2018 report on the experiences of refugee children – another group for whom moving often means missing out on long periods of school. UNICEF conducted a survey of recent arrivals in which 86 young people took part: “At the secondary level, only 14% of respondents… started school within 20 days, with 33% waiting over 3 months (one young person waited 9 months for a place and two waited almost 5 months).”  This is a small sample, but there is no reason to think it untypical, particularly as one factor that UNICEF highlights in explanation is “an increasingly fragmented admissions system” an issue which also concerns the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA).

If school admissions in England worked as The School Admissions Code says it should, every school application would be resolved within 15 school days, which is 3 school weeks. This is in itself a significant chunk of teaching and learning to lose: a parent taking a child out of school for a 3 week holiday would expect a hefty fine. But unfortunately, the OSA tells us, in its 2019 annual report, this system doesn’t work as it should and the three week loss of learning often turns into many months.

Refugees arriving in an area, Children in Care being moved around the system and children being evicted from their homes, are not neatly organised to take up school places in September. They are almost invariably “in-year” admissions and, unlike admissions at the start of Year R and Year 7, no-one coordinates in-year admissions. Most faith schools as well as all academies are responsible for their own admissions and between them these comprise around half of all primary schools and over 80% of secondaries. The result is a system unfit for purpose, one which is open to abuse by unscrupulous schools or academy chains on tight budgets and overly concerned about league table standings and Ofsted gradings.

Children in the three groups discussed in this blog have suffered trauma. In addition: 56% of Looked after Children have Special Educational Needs or Disabilities; homeless children come from poor families (rich people don’t tend to get evicted); many refugees require teachers with ESOL skills. All three groups are made up of children whom some schools might wish to discourage from harming their statistics. The result is quite literally tens of thousands of children missing school. Think of these children next time you hear a minister or a prime minister weeping crocodile tears about “the attainment gap”.

And, yes, unfair detention and all, Carlita was luckier than she may ever know.

Dame Rachel and The Missing Children (Part 1)

The year I retired, a family moved from our school at Easter. It was a planned move. The father had a new job; they had found a house they liked; parents and children were all excited to be starting a fresh chapter in their lives. A few weeks after they left, the father rang me. The council said his children could not start school until September. They would be missing more than three months of education. Could I help? Sadly, though I tried, the answer was no, there was absolutely nothing I could do.

It was not lost on this parent – how could it be? – that the same Local Authority which refused his children school places for three months was fining other parents for their children missing a few days of school.

Similar hypocrisy about the importance of school for children has been widely seen during the current pandemic. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector (HMCI), Government Ministers, journalists and broadcasters have frequently painted the loss of learning due to Covid in almost apocalyptic terms. Robert Halfon MP, chair of Parliament’s Education Select Committee has talked of “a decade of educational poverty”; Michael Gove addressed Local Authorities specifically when he said: “if you really care about children, you will want them to be in school”; former HMCI Michael Wilshaw insisted schools would have to open in the evenings, at weekends and during the holidays to catch up.

Now, the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has launched an enquiry to find out what has happened to 80,000 – 100,000 “children who have ‘fallen off the radar’ and not returned to the classroom after lockdown.”

The truth is that children in England missing out on school is nothing new, and it affects far more than 100,000. A report for the Local Government Association published in 2020 states: “Our best estimate is that in 2018/19, more than a quarter of a million children in England may have missed out on a formal full-time education… Depending on how one defines ‘formal’ and ‘full-time’ it could be closer to 200,000 or over 1 million.”

Linking the issue of “missing children” to Covid, as Dame Rachel is doing, suggests that over the past 18 months thousands of young people have taken advantage of pandemic turmoil to absent themselves from education, and thousands of parents, concerned for their own or their children’s health, have kept their children at home. For Dame Rachel, this is a problem caused by parents and pupils themselves, whereas the real scandal – or rather, series of scandals – is that some schools, most Local Authorities and many Academy Chains routinely and knowingly deprive large numbers of pupils of their right to an education and the Department for Education is complicit in this.

Scandal Number 1 is at least 3,000 children with SEND who have no educational provision at all. In the words of the Local Government Association’s 2020 report, Local Authorities do not have enough money: “adequately to fulfil their responsibilities in relation to ensuring all children receive a suitable education.” There’s a shortfall of at least half a billion pounds in SEND funding nationally. And this is rising.

Scandal 2 is a forced rise in Home Education (EHE). EHE is an option chosen by some parents because it suits their circumstances and they believe it is better for their children, but in 2019 the Office of the Children’s Commissioner found the number of children being home educated (42,000) had doubled in 5 years and was increasing by 20% every year. Mike Wood, owner of the website Home Education UK, speaking to Schoolsweek in 2018 explains this by stating that some schools have created a “hostile environment” for pupils with SEND.

This “hostile environment” is not just a product of funding. The press publishes lists of the “best” schools and naturally school leaders want to be on them, but unfortunately these lists are based entirely on test and exam results. Meanwhile, as I explained in my last blog post, being inclusive can harm a school’s Ofsted grading. These are powerful incentives for some schools and academy chains to deliberately make themselves unwelcoming to pupils who may require a little more effort or may find it more difficult to achieve high test scores.

The same powerful incentives work to produce scandal number 3. In 2019 Ofsted published a report on off-rolling which found over 20,000 pupils across the country who did not progress to Year 11 in 2017-18 but left their secondary schools at the end of Year 10. “For about half of these pupils”, Ofsted wrote, “we did not know their destination because they had not moved to another state-funded school.” Dame Rachel knows all about this scandal. The Guardian reported that the Inspiration Trust lost 5.4% of its Y10 pupils to an unknown destination in 2017-18. CEO of the Inspiration Trust at this time was the very same Dame Rachel who last week got very exercised about children missing education and promised the BBC: “Literally, I am going to go out and find them.”

It is, of course, illegal to push pupils away, exclude them, off-roll them, or deny them a school place because they have SEND, are expensive to teach, or are unlikely to shine in public exams. These are children who have more need of the very best our education system can provide; they do not deserve to be cut adrift.

But this is only the beginning. You will have noticed that the Local Government Association report estimated 250,000 children were not in school, while the scandals mentioned above account for only around 35,000. There are even bigger scandals which involve much larger numbers of pupils and are equally, or even more, shocking and upsetting.

I will write about those scandals next week.

Will School “Closures” Cost Children £40,000 each?

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) claims “The Crisis in Lost Learning” will cost pupils on average £40,000 over a lifetime.  Most children, it says, will have lost “more than 5% of their entire time in school” by the time lockdown finishes, and as a result we will all be poorer and less productive while those already disadvantaged will suffer the most.

Before anyone gets carried away let’s be clear about something.  The BBC article says the IFS has published a “report”; The Times also says “report” but in addition uses the word “review” and quotes “Lord O’Neill of Gatley, a former schools minister” drawing conclusions from what he calls “this research”.  So it’s important to say that the IFS itself calls the publication an “observation”, or to put it another way: it’s just the author’s opinion. 

This “observation” is no more authoritative than my blog post from last year in which I expressed my opinion that the need to catch up is a myth.  Or my other blog post in which I discussed the approach of some other countries to summer schools and “catch up”.  As I pointed out in these articles there is a lot of “hyperbolic, almost apocalyptic, language” around lost learning, and the IFS has now joined the chorus of doom-mongers.

At least the IFS, unlike many politicians, has made some attempt to back up its opinions, though at least two of the links in its “observation” don’t work, and the article which it says “found that a year of schooling increases individuals’ earnings by 8% per year, on average, across advanced and high-income countries” costs £35 to read so I passed.  But the case for its dire predictions of catastrophe is summed up in this statement:

“All learning is dynamic and builds on skills and knowledge gained at previous stages. Without sufficient catch-up, children will leave school with less knowledge and skills that can be applied in their job or a lower ability to gain further skills.”

Really?  Of course children need to learn key skills to the highest level: speaking, listening, reading, writing, comprehension, counting, calculation and so on.  It is also true that, for example, if you learn one foreign language it is easier to learn a second.  In this sense it is accurate to state that children need knowledge and skills which can be applied in their future careers and which help them to learn further skills. 

But it is demonstrably not true that if you leave school at 16 you have less ability to gain further skills than a classmate who stays in formal education through to his or her twenties: an army of motor mechanics, electricians, plumbers, carpenters… and, yes, an army of actual soldiers, gives the lie to this. 

Individual workers will not be paid less in future because they missed 5% of their normal school entitlement, and if future economic conditions mean there are fewer businesses to employ those workers this is much more likely to be due to the economic costs of the pandemic generally and of Brexit, which are huge as the IFS itself has reported.

If it is true that most British children will lose 5% of their time in school during this pandemic, then the good news is that all children will still have 95% of their normal entitlement to education.  That 95% –  95%! – should be the headline.  I believe formal schooling is massively important, but I could not credibly claim that every single thing I have taught children is applicable to their jobs later in life or to their ability to gain further skills.  That was never my intention and nor should it have been.

The school curriculum is not narrowly utilitarian.  It is not supposed to be.  The mission statement for state education in England and Wales was provided by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Lowe, when the Great Reform Act of 1867 suddenly tripled the number of voters and led directly to the establishment of universal schooling in 1870.  “We must educate our future masters,” Lowe said.

SATs and league tables are suspended; Ofsted inspections are paused; GCSE and A-level exams are changed, and there are voices questioning why we need any of these things.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, instead of politicians and commentators queuing up to issue dire warnings about mythical future catastrophes, we could take the opportunity to re-think the fundamental purpose of our education system?  The last time we as a country did this was in the forties, when education, which had been hugely disrupted during the war, was renewed by the 1944 Education Act.

Perhaps in another national crisis it is appropriate to look at this again. It’s more than time we did.

To Fine or Not to Fine?

I agree with the 250 psychiatrists who have written to Gavin Williamson imploring him to ditch fines for non-attendance at school, though my reasoning is more practical: fining parents doesn’t work.  It causes huge resentment; it discriminates against the poorest families; and it doesn’t work.

A couple of years ago one of my nephews, his wife and three children went to Australia for the holiday of a lifetime and to visit his older brother.  They went in school term time because, even factoring in the hefty fines expected from the Local Authority, the cost of flights was so much cheaper that it made economic sense.  

I yield to no-one in recognising the importance of school but I have seen no evidence that children taking holidays in term-time suffer academically.  This year’s pandemic has shown education can happen outside the school walls, and in 2016 I looked back over my own school’s data and discovered something surprising.

In 2014, we had 42 children in Year 6.  16 had never had a single day of absence recorded as holiday in their entire school careers; 14 had taken 10 days or more, the equivalent of two school weeks.  Every single one of the pupils who had been on holiday for ten days or more during term time achieved at least Level 4, the expected level for their age, in Reading.  This was 20% higher than for the children who had taken no term-time holidays.  In Maths the gap was greater, at 25%.

The picture in 2013 was even more dramatic.  In both Reading and Maths, 95% of the children who had taken two weeks’ holiday or more achieved Level 4 or above.  For the children who had never taken term-time holidays the figures were 38% for Reading and 63% for Maths.  That year, our highest performing pupil at the end of Year Six had spent the whole of the previous September in Tanzania.  You will understand therefore why I didn’t report families to the Local Authority for taking unauthorised holidays. 

The point is not that being out of school necessarily helps a child perform well academically; that would be absurd.  The point is the holiday experience, and that not all education takes place within school walls.  Schools devote time and effort to developing children’s imaginations and abilities.  We expose them to zoos, museums, theatres and stately homes.  One infant school in our area annually took all its pupils on a 150 mile round trip to the beach every summer.  Yet nothing we do could compensate for the lack of a proper holiday: time to feel sand between the toes, to explore rock pools, to savour unfamiliar sights and smells, and above all to share relaxed, quality time with siblings and parents.  And the fact is that for many families inflated prices at peak times mean the choice is a holiday in school term time, or no holiday at all.  

Attendance certainly does have an impact on achievement, but the pupils for whom low attendance is really damaging are those who miss odd days, and whose approach to school is casual and uncommitted.  Over the two years covered by my study several children lost the equivalent of 10 days a year or more without going on holiday: not one of these achieved a Level 4 or above in every area. 

For these children too, fining their parents seemed to have no effect on attendance.  I only once authorised fines for poor attendance.  Two families were involved and both had several children in the school; their home lives appeared chaotic, with few rules and apparently no set routines; both families were ‘known to social services’ and in neither case did the fine make the slightest difference.  (One mum told me years later, with a laugh, that she “never paid anyway”; I have no idea how that works.)

In time I did find something that helped. I invited some mums to volunteer in the school.  After consulting with the chair of governors I turned a blind eye to historical infractions that surfaced on DBS checks.  These involved shoplifting as a teenager or minor drugs offences, there was never any violence or anything that would cause concern about the safety of children.  Allowing, and inviting, parents to volunteer proved an excellent source of high quality staff.  Several volunteers, including some of those whose children’s attendance had previously been a concern, went on to paid employment in the school, and perhaps more importantly, their children’s attendance improved dramatically. 

A fine is a very blunt instrument.  If it cannot discourage many from taking holidays in term-time, or persuade others to improve their routines, become more organised and give school a higher priority, it stands no chance of conquering the anxiety of a parent scared for the health of their children, or terrified that their child, symptom-free herself, might bring home a virus to infect a vulnerable grandparent.

So forget the fines, which can only be imposed on the say-so of the headteacher.  Instead, talk to your parents, show them the measures you have put in place, make a real effort to bring them on-side if you can, but if they still remain too anxious, be prepared to accommodate this with other arrangements for learning.  Yes, it’s more work.  Yes, it’s a pain.  But it’s far better than beating parents with a blunt instrument which is most unlikely to produce the result you want, and even if it does will generate resentment and rancour.

Playing Catch Up

“We’ll be doing a huge amount of catch up for pupils over the summer months, Gavin Williamson [will be] setting out a lot more next week about the catch-up programme,”  our Prime Minister announced on Wednesday, and on Thursday his spokesperson revealed that the plans would involve all pupils not just the most vulnerable.

I have a long history of involvement with summer schools.  As a child I attended some; as a student I earned money working on others.  While a young teacher I volunteered to help organise and run them, and when I was a head our school held various different summer schools at different times, focusing on things like literacy, art and sport and targeting children with severe special needs or who were vulnerable in other ways.

But the Prime Minister’s announcement left me distinctly uneasy.  Why is Gavin Williams waiting until next week to announce the details?  Because, of course, these are not yet finalised and this becomes yet another initiative like the plan for social care which was apparently “ready to go” in July 2019, or the “world-beating” track and trace app lauded in May, both of which were over-promised too soon. 

In Education the “promise now, work out the details later” approach has made life extremely difficult for everyone who works in schools and particularly school leaders.  The start of school lockdown in March, the provisions for education at home, arrangements for the funding of free school meals, the re-opening in June…  policies seem to have been dreamt up without anyone thinking them through.  And now we have catch up summer schools.

Last week the Irish minister of education, Joe McHugh, also made an announcement about summer schools.  In 2020 they “will be similar to the July Provision of previous years,” he said, “and children with Down Syndrome will be included as part of our plans…”  The focus will be on helping children “renew relationships, routines and connections with school and with learning and help to support ongoing social development and wellbeing.” 

Wellbeing is also emphasised in Spain, another country which proposes to build on existing provision.  Spain has a summer learning programme to combat el olvido veraniego (the summer forgetting), and participation for pupils from economically deprived families and those at risk of social exclusion is funded by the state.  For 2020 the ministerio de educación has brought out a guide to adapting these summer schools.  It states: “This year the summer programme will be especially critical to ensure the wellbeing of children and adolescents.”

Sadly, I don’t read German or Danish, but I do have an Italian brother-in-law.  In Italy, he explains, pupils need to pass annual exams in order to progress to the next year.  In 2020 the exams are less rigorous and all students will move up.  Rather than catch up summer schools, the Government has suggested that in September students will need to cover things they missed this year.

(Fun fact: Summer holidays in Ireland run for the whole of July and August, which is more than eight weeks compared to barely six in England and Wales. Spain’s summer holiday is a full ten weeks. In Italy it varies from region to region but is nowhere less than 12 weeks.)

Widely admired for its successful approach to the pandemic, New Zealand is another place which does not seem to envisage special catch up programmes.  When schools re-opened the Education Ministry included a section in its regular bulletin for school leaders headed: Welcoming children back to school.  It begins:

Some families and children may be anxious about returning to school, while others may be excited. Your calm response and delight at seeing everyone back and together again can make a significant difference. Here is some guidance for teachers to support student wellbeing when everyone goes back to school…

However, the catch-up approach I most liked the look of was in Singapore which is universally regarded as having a highly effective education system.  Its schools, colleges and universities were closed for twelve weeks this year, and in partial compensation it has announced that any university student graduating, or entering the workforce, in 2020 will be entitled to four additional modules of teaching, for free if they wish. 

I have written in a previous blog why I believe the principle of summer schools to “catch up” for learning lost to coronavirus is wrong, and drawn attention to the hyperbolic, almost apocalyptic, language with which it is advanced.  Earlier this year, I drew attention to the fact that thousands of our most vulnerable children are left without school places for months on end.  This has been reported on by the Children’s Commissioner and by the Children’s Society.  If the Government really cared about vulnerable children, which is a large part of the rationale for its catch up summer schools, it would have solved this problem – or at least attempted to.

Spain and Ireland already have well established summer programmes to help children with special needs, or from economically deprived backgrounds or at risk of social exclusion.  They, along with New Zealand, strongly emphasise that pupil wellbeing must be a priority in the coming months.

All the countries I have mentioned have plans that have been thought through.  I cannot imagine Leo Varadkar, and much less Jacinda Ardern, making a policy announcement of an initiative that hasn’t been properly developed, yet our Prime Minister seems to do this all the time.

The whole World has faced the challenge of Covid-19.  Too often it has seemed that other governments take the lead in tackling it seriously while we play catch up.  This talk of summer schools is just another example.

CLA5: The Campaign

In the last two weeks 9 Local Authorities (LAs) have written to me pledging to process all in-year admissions for looked after children within 5 days, or to ensure that all such children are in school within 10 days, or both.  I call this the CLA5 commitment.  In addition, 3 other LAs have not made the commitment but pointed out that in practice they deal with these admissions within 7 days (2/3 in one case), and 2 Anglican dioceses have committed to encourage the schools they control, and which are their own admission authorities, to meet these timescales.

This is important because literally thousands of these very vulnerable young people are missing out, or have missed out, on months of school at a time.  I wrote about some children I knew personally who were in this position, here, and about the general problem here.  

If a parent takes a child on holiday in term time the law says they should expect to be fined.  We believe their right to an education is being infringed.  Yet we turn a blind eye to the fact that many children for whom local authorities assume the role of parents (CLA) seem to thereby lose their right to schooling.  Somehow these very vulnerable children are expected to cope, where others who are more secure and perhaps higher achieving, cannot.  The Schools Admission Code says CLA children should be the top priority: they go to the front of every queue; schools may admit them even if the school is full or an infant class is already at 30.  CLA attract the highest pupil premium funding. But all this is window dressing, because the simple fact is that many of these children are losing out by not being in school.

Writing a blog or two seems a completely inadequate response to this situation.  I wrote to the Secretary of State, to Ofsted and to the Shadow Secretary of State, because only the Government could solve the problem completely, but even if it chose to do so the wheels of Government grind slowly, so I decided to ask individual LAs, Church Dioceses, Multi-Academy Trusts and schools to make the CLA5 commitment.  

The letters I wrote, and the responses I have received so far, are set out on a blog which can be found at cla5.org

The education community could solve this scandal by welcoming children without delay.  I know for a fact that in most circumstances this isn’t hard to do.  As a head I never delayed giving a response about the admission of a looked after child and never turned one away.  My wife, who ran three schools where I was responsible for only one, did the same.  And we are not exceptional.  Many, many headteachers have exactly the same approach.

There are particular strains in some areas.  Literally dozens of young people are sent to Kent when they are taken into care, and some school leaders here complain that they are asked to shoulder a disproportionate load.  It was for this reason that I wrote to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, asking that schools which are welcoming to CLA should be given credit for this in inspection judgements.  Of course, someone should be looking at why this is happening and trying to solve this issue. But whether or not either of these are done, I would ask school leaders to remember that the situation is never the children’s fault, and before they turn up at your gate they have already been through an experience which may well have left them traumatised.

Thank you to Cheshire West and Chester, Devon, Hillingdon, Kensington and Chelsea, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Nottingham City, Reading, Swindon, Warrington and Westminster LAs, as well as the Dioceses of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich (Suffolk) and Exeter.  To really help Looked After Children we need every Local Authority, every Diocese, every MAT and every school in the country to make the CLA5 commitment.

If you agree with the aims of this campaign, and would like to help, please consider asking your own LA, Diocese, MAT or school to make the commitment.  There are more than 20,000 state schools in the country.  It will take me a while to contact them on my own and I would be grateful for some help.

There are further details about all of this, including a sample letter/e-mail on cla5.org 

A coda to my New Year Challenge

Last week I wrote a blog about looked after children.  Today I met a former colleague for lunch and listened open-mouthed and with growing anger as she told me what happened to a family of four children taken into care at the start of last term. 

First, of course, they were split up.  Few placements will take four siblings together.  Then they were sent, separately, to foster carers in distant counties.  The eldest boy ran away several times, and each time attempted to reach his home.  After six weeks the parents regained custody and the children came home.  None of the four had spent a single day in school in the entire six weeks.

I know these children.  The three youngest are hard-working, quiet, sensible and keen to please, the eldest is confused, unhappy and sometimes needs coaxing.  None of them has any special needs; they would not disrupt a classroom, or hold back anyone else’s learning.  In short, there is no reason why any school should hesitate before offering them a place.

At the worst time in their young lives, when their family life was ripped apart, their friends and comfortable routines were torn from them and left far behind, our system decided to hammer these children further by damaging their education and harming their life chances. 

In my blog I urged school leaders to open their hearts and the doors of their schools to vulnerable children like these.  Please.  Let’s do it.

A Challenge for the New Year

This New Year, let’s resolve to do what we in education can to make the lives of vulnerable children better.

Within weeks one summer, we said farewell to a looked after child in Year 3 who left for a new life on the east coast, and welcomed a Year 5 who joined us from a city fifty miles to the south.  There are 30,000 children in care, 41% of the total, who are placed outside the area “they would call home” and “Pass The Parcel”  is a shamefully apt name for the report on their experiences published by Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, on Christmas Eve.

For a child, being placed in care is traumatic.  I have known children removed from their families for all sorts of reasons: after child pornography was found on a parent’s phone, for example, or parents were arrested for drug offences.  More than one child I know has suffered the anguish of finding a parent unconscious after a suicide attempt, and several times children themselves disclosed sexual or physical abuse.  Almost forty years ago, a boy I taught was held at gunpoint by his father in a stand-off with police.  But whatever the immediate trigger, being in care is NEVER the child’s fault.

In emergency, the social workers look not for what is ideal but for what is possible.  So it’s no surprise that initial placements can be miles away.  But, as a report from the Children’s Society revealed in September 2019, a long term placement at a distance adds to the children’s distress and brings with it huge dangers.  

11,000 children are in care more than 20 miles from their former homes and 2,000 are a hundred miles away.  “Record numbers” of these “are going missing,” the Children’s Society says. We don’t know how many, because the DfE doesn’t publish the figures, but there are more than 70,000 “missing incidents” annually, and the number is rising.  Many looked after children run away because they are unhappy – often trying to run home – others are enticed away to be exploited. 

Of the children in care placed out of their area, 52% have special educational needs and almost half of these (24% of the total) have social emotional and mental health identified as their primary need.  And moving area compromises both educational chances and treatment on the NHS.  These highly vulnerable children are often left without a school place for months on end, and while children typically wait many months for a CAMHS appointment, those who move district go to the back of the queue every time.  The Children’s Commissioner’s report comments: “We heard teens casually talking about having to move home 10, 11 or even 15 times (numbers which we know can go much higher).  We found that over half of children placed out of area have 2 or more moves within 2 years.”  The wait for therapy which was already far too long at months, becomes years, and sometimes never.

There are good reasons why some children have to be placed in care “out of area”.  For example, some children have to go for their own safety as they are being targeted by others locally. But too often the problem is simply a lack of placements, which comes down to a lack of resources. Bluntly, some authorities are trying to save money by exporting what they see as a “problem”, and as with everything, some areas are more affected than others (Kent and Lincolnshire import four times more children in care than they export).  However, as the Children’s Society declares, this “is a national scandal”. Vulnerable children “are suffering additional trauma because local authorities – the very people tasked with keeping them safe – are sending them away.”.

“Pass The Parcel” has several recommendations, most of them for action by the Government.  But we, as educators could do our bit, starting in January.  Without delay we could make some children’s lives immeasurably better with three simple steps.

1. School leaders, open your arms.  The Admission’s Code gives theoretical priority to children in care and those with EHCPs.  Make this theory a reality and stop putting barriers between vulnerable children and school. 
2. Ofsted, stop penalising schools which take in vulnerable children: reward them instead.
3. Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, drop your objection to children being placed in schools that Ofsted describes as Requires Improvement.

Shockingly, some of the young people spoken to for “Pass the Parcel” believed that their experiences were so awful they were “punishment” for things the children themselves had done.  Let’s end this national scandal in 2020.