WFH parents ‘make children think school is optional’

Oliver, 52, is concerned this has led to a fundamental change in attitudes among pupils, who question why they should go into school every day if their parents are not going into their office with the same regularity.

Under plans to reform Ofsted’s inspection reports, after the suicide of the head teacher Ruth Perry shortly after her Berkshire school was downgraded from “outstanding” to “inadequate’, schools will for the first time be graded on attendance rates. A coroner said the inspection of Perry’s school “lacked fairness, respect and sensitivity”.

The watchdog has already scrapped its one or two-word “overall effectiveness” judgments, which were deemed crude and unfair by unions. It is proposing a new system that grades schools separately on as many as 11 areas, from the curriculum and teacher development to pupils’ personal wellbeing and attendance. The report cards will be introduced from November.

The new Ofsted report cards include inclusivity for the first time

Oliver, a former secondary school art teacher and head teacher, said: “[After the pandemic], suddenly people were used to working from home and, in many cases, I don’t think there was that same desire to have their child in school whilst they were at home. They had been used to it for the best part of a year and a half, on and off, during lockdown. That changed something.

“If my mum and dad were at home all day, would I want to get up and leave the house, knowing that they were both there? I would be tempted to perhaps say, ‘Can I not stay with you?’ Seeing my dad [a potato merchant] go out early to work often hours before I had even got up, well, there’s an expectation: put your shoes on, put your school uniform on and go out the door and go to school, go to work.”

• Rise of the high-flying pupils who keep missing school

He added: “I think developing good social habits of getting up in the morning, putting your shoes on instead of your slippers, going out to work, going to school, expecting to complete a full day’s school, a full day’s work, clearly that’s habit-forming.”

A small number of schools allow children to be “flexi-schooled”, where parents can teach their children at home for part of the week.

The death of Ruth Perry after an Ofsted inspection led to a change in inspection reports

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE

“Nationally, Fridays have always been the worst attendance day [for schools] but then I look at Westminster [where Ofsted is based] and I see the place clearing out on a Thursday night very often. Again, is there something in that?” said Oliver.

So are children copying adult working patterns? “Yes,” he said emphatically.

Some large companies, including Boots, Amazon and JP Morgan, asked their staff to return to the office full-time last year. Many others are setting different rules, such as insisting staff return for at least three days a week.

But Oliver thinks the working-from-home culture will persist. “We’re still going to have to deal with the fact that there are great things you can do really efficiently behind a screen now. That’s inevitably going to continue to challenge schools in ways of thinking, but you can’t deny that a child accessing other children, other adults and learning to socialise, is a clear benefit of schooling.”

Last year, the government published guidance for parents to encourage them to send their children to school if they had minor illnesses or mild anxiety. It said “going into school can help children to feel less worried than letting them stay at home” and that it was usually safe to send children in with a “minor cough, runny nose or sore throat”.

Oliver said several other factors were also affecting attendance, including poor mental health, such as anxiety and depression,and a lack of funding for services such as school nurses and child psychologists, as well as difficulties luring children away from their screens.

Official figures show a fifth of primary school children are now persistently absent, missing at least one day a fortnight

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He said: “In lockdown we said to children, ‘Stay at home to be educated, go online’. Then we said, ‘Come in for your education, don’t go online, don’t go on your phone’. You can understand that was quite confusing for children going through their formative years. Nurseries, schools, colleges have worked really hard to get over that and we are seeing great successes but there’s more than can be done.”

Oliver, who went to a local school in Lincolnshire, was on strong medication until the age of 12 to treat childhood convulsions but still attended school every day, though he says he was regularly “zonked” and unable to concentrate.

He has taught for 28 years, including for the past 14 as a head teacher and then as chief executive of the Outwood Grange Academies Trust, which runs 41 schools in several counties such as North Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

• We gamed the system for a good school place

Oliver has experienced 96 Ofsted inspections during his career, both as a teacher and a head teacher, most of which went well, but empathises with the many teachers who dread Ofsted inspection, recalling one poor grading he felt was unjust.

After taking over a secondary school in Yorkshire that required improvement, he says teachers and leadership did “wonderful things to improve that school”. Yet a follow-up inspection ruled the school still required improvement after a survey of pupils raised concerns of bullying and discriminatory language. Oliver believes the survey did not clarify whether the abuse was inside or outside school. “They asked broad questions and those coloured the report disproportionately”, he said.

Under the new system there will be a traffic light system, similar to nutritional labelling, so parents can more easily see in which specific areas a school is excelling and struggling. Rather than four gradings from outstanding to inadequate, there will be five grades from “exemplary” to “causing concern”.

Schools will be graded on inclusion for the first time. Oliver says schools helping the most disadvantaged children and those with special educational needs, even if their grades are still below the national average, will be better recognised. Inspectors will also look at whether a school is catering for its most able students.

From November schools will be judged on attendance

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Teaching unions have been unimpressed. The National Education Union said the proposals were crude, rushed and did not provide more meaningful information for parents. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said it would lead to a higher workload.

When asked about this, Oliver appears exasperated, saying the unions “asked me to deliver” a more nuanced and complex report and then said it was too complex and nuanced. He is particularly irked by a blanket copy-and-paste response that the NAHT has suggested head teachers send to Ofsted that says “I strongly disagree” to almost every question asked in the consultation.

Many parents appear to like the changes. A poll of more than 800 parents by the More in Common think tank found 65 per cent preferred the new report card.

Oliver said: “Parents wanted clarity. They wanted to know how good their child’s school, their child’s nursery was, but they accepted a blunt instrument of [one] overall word didn’t do that for them. We’re trying to get the best of both of them.”