What are the limits of ‘school’?

It has been a funny few weeks in which I have had cause to question the reach of schools into the lives of families and society.

Like all secondary heads, I’ve spent countless hours (whilst conscious and also whilst asleep) picking over this summer’s exam results, wondering what I should make of the tail-end of results achieved by students who hardly ever attended my school throughout their GCSE years.

This fretting has been punctuated by the occasional bonding moment with my 17 year-old daughter as we both rage at the ‘contract’ her Sixth Form want us to sign which commits us, among other things, to get her to bed on time. I am not sure at what point schools tipped over into telling parents how to parent, but it is not a popular intrusion into our domestic affairs.

I don’t really blame the school for overstepping the mark. In a system where schools are held almost entirely accountable for a child’s educational success, where this accountability is heavy handed and crass, it is no surprise that schools pull every lever possible to ramp up results (including telling me how to do something I already have in hand, thank you very much).

Perhaps I should take a moment between fretting and raging to ponder the limits of this thing we call ‘school’. How far do we want its tendrils to reach? How many of society’s problems are we expecting these institutions to fix?

For example, is it the role of schools to resolve children’s mental health problems? What about to sort out bullying on social media? Or to feed hungry kids?

Even if your answer is a firm ‘no’ to all of the above, just you try to stop schools doing it. You see it is one thing to make an intellectual case for these problems being beyond the remit of an organisation whose purpose is to educate, but quite another to be faced with hungry, sick, bullied children every day and not try to help. We have, after all, filled school buildings with adults who get a great deal of satisfaction helping young people to live better lives.

This help comes in the form of mindfulness interventions, counselling services, family mediation, parenting classes, free school meals, food parcels, subsidies for uniform and resources, and numerous other well-meaning efforts.

There are problems with the above. First, some interventions make things worse, not better, as we are starting to realise when it comes to mindfulness programmes. Second, schools are distracted from their educational role and become a social service, at the risk of doing neither particularly well. Third, we risk hiding the problems that should really be being solved by other agencies. Lastly, schools can overstep the mark when they come to believe they know better than the child’s parents.

And so we come to the problem of absence from school. Whose responsibility is it to get children into school?

The AWOL generation

Since the advent of compulsory secondary education, we’ve been convincing parents that attending school is without question ‘a good thing’. For the most part, parents have bought into this narrative. That is, until the year 2020 when, well you know the rest…

As this article states, persistent absence from school has more than doubled since the pandemic. 28% of students in mainstream secondary schools were absent for 10% or more of the last academic year. In Year 11 last year, 31% missed a day a fortnight, 14% a day a week, and 5% attended fewer than half the days they should have.

What has happened? Well, it appears to be a number of things. First, the social contract – the tacit agreement between parents and the state that children should and would attend school every day – appears to have been renegotiated. Some parents just don’t believe that school is so important that their children need to be there every day, at the expense of other things such as holidays, leisure, comfort and psychological safety. This attitudinal change started when we told students during lockdown that school was not the best place to be, and was exacerbated when schools closed or partly closed for strike action.

Second, factors which make attending school for some children much harder like poverty, psychological distress, and special educational needs, have increased significantly in prevalence and degree.

So, that’s why. Perhaps a bigger question though is whose job it is to solve the problem.

For my school, a semi-rural secondary comprehensive in a fairly affluent part of the South West of England, you might imagine that these problems aren’t as severe, but you’d be wrong. 26% of our Year 11 cohort were persistently absent last year, with 6% attending for less than 50% of the year. As you would expect, these students did significantly less well in their GCSEs than the ones whose attendance was good.

But as I ponder this problem, I can’t help wonder whether morally or pragmatically the solution is within my reach. Pragmatically, we are at a loss to know what else we can do that we are not already doing to get such children into school. We neither have the resource or expertise to address the underlying problems that prevent attendance. Morally, should it be schools who single-handedly rebuild the social contract, heal the sick, and provide the financial support needed to get these students across the threshold daily?

And I have a more profound question, as I wrote about here: should we even be solving the problem at all? Should we accept that perhaps school is not the best place for every young person, all of the time? After all, we have the technology available now to provide an education for students without them travelling to our run-down, falling down school buildings anymore.

Cruel optimism

Expecting schools to fix the school attendance problem, and expecting school to be the solution to children’s problems, is what the historian Lauren Berlant called ‘cruel optimism’.

This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture – like obesity, or depression, or addiction – and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon – but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.

Johann Hari, Stolen Focus (2022)

Teachers will be familiar with the concept of cruel optimism if they have ever attended a ‘wellbeing day’ organised by their school. The idea behind such days is that the solution to work stress is within the grasp of the individual, if only they could spend more time doing things that restore their inner peace and tranquility. Of course, we know that poor wellbeing for teachers is due to a multitude of factors such as having too much work to do, long working hours, unreasonable expectations, lack of control, job insecurity, injustice, unruly children, lack of support and understanding from those more senior to you, and conflict between colleagues. Of course, chilling out and having some ‘me time’ may help mitigate the effects of stress, but the solution to stress does not reside with the individual.

As with workplace stress, so too is it cruel optimism to cheerfully tell students who do not, often cannot, attend school that it offers the solution to their problems, if only they would attend! Similarly, to pretend that the school has within it the solution to the complex set of circumstances that are causing severe school attendance problems across the country is insulting and harmful to those who take such responsibilities very seriously.

And yet we are cruelly optimistic with schools all the time. The Pupil Premium strategy, introduced back in 2011, is perhaps the ultimate illusion that many of those working in the sector have cheerfully bought into. Social inequality? Take this dose of school and you will feel so much better. The growing gap in educational outcomes since the pandemic should remind us that long-term, permanent solutions to educational inequality can only be found upstream. In the meantime, we’ll keep swimming against the flood.

There are limits to school and there should be limits to what we allow to be asked of those working in them. Is it reasonable to expect schools to solve persistent absence problems through persuasion, perseverance and pandering?

And yet, schools will be held to account for the results of children who we didn’t even get the chance to teach.

Where next?

There are two fundamental problems with leaving it to schools to solve the persistent absence problem: much is neither within their remit or reach. That is not to say schools should do nothing about getting students to attend. If a child is not attending school because they have fallen behind, the school must help them catch up. If a child is not attending school because they are being bullied there, the school must take action. Where the causal factor is situated within the school and it is within the school’s power and expertise to solve it then it should do so. However, schools cannot solve poverty or the mental health crisis, and it cannot change societal attitudes towards school.

A decade or more ago, when schools were cast as the policy solution to educational inequality, we let government off the hook for addressing the root causes of this inequality. If schools accept sole responsibility for getting children back into school, we will make the same mistake again.

How can we stop schools over-reaching? First, we need a policy agenda that allows schools to be schools i.e. institutions focussed on educational purpose, not social change. Second, we need the services that should be meeting social needs to be rebuilt. Third, we need a conversation about what schools are for, and more importantly what they are not for. Fourth, we need a funding system that sets out clearly what schools are being funded for. Last, we need an accountability system that holds schools to account only for that which is within their control and remit.

I am neither cheerful or optimistic that any of this will come to pass. To be honest, I’m at my limit.