The former children’s laureate Anne Fine has said parents should consider letting pupils learn online instead of going to school.
Instead of punishing families for child absenteeism, society should ask itself what school refusers are trying to say – and how it can accommodate them, she said.
Fine, who on Thursday published On the Wall, her 95th book, said absenteeism numbers in school were “absolutely startling”. She added: “You have to ask yourself, why are the numbers so high and is there a way to bring them down?
“I 100% think that an idea that needs pursued and thought about is that there should be a slipstream of online learning for the children who would prefer to learn that way,” she said. “Absenteeism is so bad now that we’re no longer in a situation where we can dismiss an idea like this. I think it might work out incredibly well.”
The proportion of pupils classified as persistently absent – missing more than one in 10 lessons – has more than doubled in England since the pandemic. From 10.9% in 2018-19, it rose to 22.3% in 2022-23.
Data in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is collected separately because education is devolved, but indicates a similar trend.
The research agency Public First has called the situation a “full-blown national crisis”, saying that pupils most likely to be absent include those on free school meals and with special educational needs.
Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, has emphasised the importance of attendance, saying that all children, even those with mild or moderate anxiety, are likely to be better off in school.
But Fine, who has won the Carnegie medal for writing twice, said: “We learned that teaching online can work because it did for a lot of children during Covid. So, the question shouldn’t be, ‘Why aren’t these children going to school?’ because we shouldn’t still be making the simplistic assumption that every child is better off in school.”
She added: “If the child doesn’t want to go into school, we should ask if they’re really worse off at home. For many, the answer will be ‘possibly not’ – and for those who can’t manage to socialise at school, the answer will be ‘probably not’.”
Fine counts herself as having been one of those children. “I hated socialising at school,” she said. “‘Now choose a partner to work with’ are my least favourite words in the entire English language.
“For those of my temperament, I don’t think that’s unusual – and I don’t think my temperament is that unusual either. There must be lots of children who would be happier not learning in school.
“Even now if you put me in a room with 29 other people I didn’t choose to be with, all day and every day, and with whom my only link is that we’re of the same age, I’d be miserable. Why shouldn’t children feel the same?”
Fine suggested society should question the entire assumption behind the way it educates its young people.
“If you go back to first principles, would you invent a system where you take a load of children who have got nothing in common at all, and pump them in and teach them all together?” she asked.
Fine has a theory: she said education had been changing long before Covid – children had been encouraged to be self-aware, autonomous individuals rather than empty vessels whose role it was to store the knowledge bestowed on them.
But then Covid came along. This, for everyone, was a “watershed” moment, said Fine, when society realised the internet offered an alternative way to learn. And children did too.
“For the children who had already felt that school wasn’t quite right the way it was before, they now saw an alternative,” she said. “And that’s how we should be looking at this now. Not through the lens of it being a massive problem that needs to be dealt with through fines, which will be disastrous financially for families and do nothing for relations between the school and the family, or the parent and the child.
“Absenteeism should be thought of as, ‘Here are a lot of children trying to tell us something. How can we accommodate what it is they’re telling us?’”
