Thank you to Eva Wiseman for her compassionate article (“Schools today are failing – and it’s clear who needs detention”, Magazine). I disagree somewhat with Ofsted’s narrative about attendance. Numbers of those persistently absent have been increasing since the early 2010s and tend to happen at key-stage changes (years 1, 3, 7 and 10). This usually impacts those who are neurodiverse and have known special educational needs. Half of the pupils with persistent attendance issues experience difficulty with attendance by the age of seven. It’s convenient for Ofsted to blame parents and Covid, when actually this problem has been gradually increasing for years.
I have an autistic son who has had no meaningful education for over two years. Parents like me end up going to court to beg for more support or get press-ganged into “electively home educating”. There is very little Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services support for the neurodivergent.
