Education Desk : Schools in England are experiencing “a huge amount” of pupil absence on Fridays, with many children staying at home with their parents and caregivers after a shift in attitudes since Covid, MPs have been told.

Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, told the education committee that persistent absence from schools was “one of the issues of our age” and called for a “razor sharp focus” on the problem.

The committee heard that mental health issues, disadvantage and unmet special educational needs and disabilities were significant factors behind increased persistent absence in schools since the Covid crisis, reports The Guardian.

De Souza said she had data analysis that showed 818,000 of the 1.6 million children who were persistently absent across the autumn and spring terms in 2021-22 were off school for reasons other than illness. “I think that’s very serious,” she said.

She also told MPs that discussions with families had revealed a number of additional reasons why children were missing school. “One is because of online learning in Covid, there’s a little bit of, ‘Well, why can’t we just have online learning’. So that attitude has come through a bit.”

She also pointed to analysis of attendance data - before and after Covid - provided by a number of large multi-academy trusts, which showed a jump in the number of pupils not attending school on Fridays, a trend that did not exist before the pandemic.

“We’re seeing a huge amount of Friday absence that wasn’t there before,” she told the committee. “Parents are at home on Fridays. We’ve had evidence from kids: ‘Well, you know, mum and dad are at home, stay at home.’” More parents are working from home as patterns changed as a result of the Covid crisis.

MPs also heard that a “cultural shift” away from schools as purely places of academic learning with a new emphasis on enrichment activities and pastoral care could help improve attendance.

Alice Wilcock, the head of education at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) thinktank, said increased academic pressure to catch up, plus the feeling that activities pupils enjoyed such as sport or music were being squeezed out of the curriculum, were fostering a disengagement from education.

She called for a particular focus on severe absence, where pupils miss more than 50% of school sessions, and said the CSJ had pointed out that numbers multiplied over the past 10 years to 118,000 children. As of autumn 2020, more than 1,000 schools had an entire class-worth of children who were severely absent.

Meanwhile, long waiting lists for child and adolescent mental health services meant pupils with anxiety and other mental health disorders that make attendance difficult were in effect “being pushed out of school”, MPs were told.

A separate report, published by the children’s commissioner’s office on Wednesday, found that average waiting times between children being referred to mental health services and starting treatment had increased for the first time since 2017.

According to the commissioner’s analysis, they have risen from 32 days in 2020-21 to 40 days in 2021-22. It highlighted the so-called postcode lottery parents still face, with stark differences in waiting times depending on where you live, from 13 days in Leicester to 80 in Sunderland.

De Souza noted the high proportion of girls detained under the Mental Health Act. Of the 869 children detained in 2021-2, 71% were female, the commissioner’s analysis showed. Overall, however, there had been a fall in the number of children detained, sectioned, or admitted to inpatient mental health wards.

The commissioner said: “It’s clear that mental health support for children across the country is patchy, despite some good progress made by the NHS in the years leading up to the pandemic.”

A government spokesperson said: “We are already investing £2.3bn a year into mental health services, meaning an additional 345,000 children and young people will be able to access NHS-funded mental health support they need by 2024.

“Support in school is vital, and we are committed to increasing the number of mental health teams to almost 400 by April 2023, providing support to 3 million children and young people.”