Bus fare or food? The support workers trying to fix England’s school absence crisis | School attendance and absence

Fleur, 13, and 12-year-old Rowan are two of the tens of thousands of children at the centre of the school attendance crisis in England. Fleur’s mental health was so poor she has missed more than half of her education. Rowan’s attendance was little better at 59%.

Rowan lives with his mother and two younger brothers. Home life is unstable so he does a lot of the housework, cooks dinner for his brothers and makes sure they get to school. There is little time to focus on his own education.

Both children were referred to a charity called School-Home Support (SHS), which works with families to try to get to the bottom of why a child is missing school and to come up with a practical support plan to improve attendance.

Fleur and her family were assigned their own support worker, who helped her access mental health support. They also applied to Buttle UK, a charity that makes grants to young people in crisis, and got funding to support Fleur’s mental wellbeing, to pay for family days out, leisure centre passes and bikes for her and her brothers. Fleur got a laptop to do her homework so she could stay engaged with school, even if she could not always get there.

Her attendance has improved, and the SHS practitioner is helping her to look for a new school, where she can make a fresh start.

Rowan’s support worker helped him to develop strategies to build more time for himself into his day and to get to bed earlier. She found him a bike so he could get to school on time, after helping his brothers, and worked with social services to make sure Rowan’s family was getting the right support, to take the pressure off him. After two months, Rowan’s attendance increased from 59.4% to 74.3%.

There are no easy fixes to the complex and multi-layered problems some families face, which can make school attendance a low priority. Where SHS differs from most interventions is that once a school refers a pupil, each child and their family get their own dedicated family support worker, who will help with everything from bedtime routines, to budgeting, benefits advice, bus passes, meal planning and housing.

Sarah Loy, who has worked as an SHS practitioner and is now safeguarding manager, said housing was having a huge effect on young people getting to school. “In Liverpool, for example, I have a large number of families that have been rehomed, either due to not being able to afford the rent or they’re fleeing domestic violence.

“They’ve been re-homed in refuges, and these can be anywhere in Liverpool. For one family I know, it’s a three-bus journey to get to school. The mum’s got a decision to make: is she going to pay for the bus fare, or is she going to buy food?”

As well as the cost of travel to school, the mother’s poor mental health has made it difficult for the family to leave the house. “It wasn’t a case of ‘couldn’t be bothered-itis’. She wanted to, she just couldn’t on some days. This is where our practitioners are amazing, because they have eyes on the whole family. They’re almost like a safety net that holds the family together.”

SHS will provide school uniforms where pupils do not have them, and washing machines to wash those uniforms. If travel is a problem, they will pay for a bus pass, then help the family to budget so they can afford the next one.

“We had a young boy in year 10 in Blackpool,” said Loy. “He lived with his mum, who was suffering with addiction. He would only be able to get himself to school some days if he could scrap around behind the sofa and down the cushions to try and find change for the bus fare. If he didn’t find enough change, he just wouldn’t go to school.”

His SHS support worker drew up a plan to help improve his attendance. “They’d start the phone calls about 7.45am to make sure that he was up and about because mum wasn’t able to do that. So the phone calls would be – ‘Are you up? Are you dressed? Are you ready? Got your bus fare?’ That type of thing.

“If he wasn’t ready, or didn’t have his bus fare, our practitioner would then go around, pick him up and drop him off at school. That’s brilliant, but it’s not helping, because then you become reliant on that lift all the time.”

Buttle helped fund a laptop so the boy could do his homework, a bike so he could get to school independently, a desk where he could work in his bedroom and a gym pass to build his self-confidence. “The best thing he absolutely loved was a pair of Nike trainers. He didn’t half walk tall,” said Loy. “That made a huge difference to him. In the autumn term he was late twice and missed just one day.”

Will school attendance ever get back to where it was were pre-Covid? “Personally I don’t think there’s enough practitioners on the ground,” says Loy. “I was in a primary school in Liverpool on Tuesday with 400 pupils. There’s one safeguarding manager, one attendance officer and more than 50% of pupils in that school are persistently absent. In the past they used to be able to go out and pick up the young people, but there’s too many of them not attending for them to be able to do that now.”