'National priority' to get children back in school after absences treble in Wales post-pandemic

The number of children persistently missing school in Wales has more than trebled since the Covid-19 pandemic.

It’s led Education Minister Jeremy Miles to label the situation a “national priority.”

In 2019, roughly one in every 20 secondary school pupils in Wales was classed as persistently absent, meaning they missed at least one day a week on average.

Now it’s around one in six.

It’s prompted the Welsh Government to issue new guidance which aims to trigger earlier intervention when children start missing more school.

Speaking to ITV Wales’s Sharp End programme, Mr Miles said: “All the things that we’re doing in school around literacy and numeracy, giving our young people that range of experiences as part of a rounded education, all the work around attainment, none of that you can benefit from if you’re a young person who’s not at school.

“So it’s really important that we make sure young people are in school with their peers, learning face to face with their teachers.”

Sharp End heard from school leaders and teachers who claim there’s been a lasting impact since the pandemic, when children across the country were forced to learn from home for months on end as the government tried to limit the virus’s contagion.

Eithne Hughes, from the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The effects of the pandemic are clearly having a significant impact on learners’ attendance, their habits, their confidence in attending school, their mental health and wellbeing.”

The Education Minister said the pandemic was not the only factor behind this rise in absences.

Jeremy Miles said: “That explains some of it. It doesn’t explain all of it. But what I think is clear is that after the pandemic there are groups of learners who you would expect to be in school who are now staying away and that can be for a complex range of reasons. 

“I’ve launched a task force with representation not just from education but also from health, social services, police and the voice of parents so that we can actually have a global view of what’s going on.

“Nobody took that decision lightly. At every point during the pandemic what we were doing was the balance of harms. On one side you’ve got the harm that comes from getting Covid. On the other you had the harm of being out of school.

“So that was absolutely uppermost in our minds throughout the period and as we said at the time schools were the last things to close and the first things to reopen again for exactly this reason.

“The focus now is making sure that the young people who are not in school are coming back to school.”

The government’s new National Attendance Taskforce will identify ways of keeping children in school, looking to learn from schools which have already found success in this endeavour.

• You can catch-up on this topic and plenty more political issues on Sharp End on ITV Cymru Wales.

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