Recent OECD data reveals an increasing number of students are absent from school for long periods.
‘Boredom’ was cited as the third most common reason behind the students’ school refusal.
Attrition from school since COVID has been a significant problem in many countries, but with teacher burnout at an all-time high, and students’ sense of belonging at school diminishing, it’s clear that rebuilding the relationships that hold schooling together and help motivate Australian students to stay in the classroom requires new focus.
“School absenteeism may have been normalised through the pandemic,” says Professor Susanne Gannon from Western Sydney University and the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE).
Pandemic-induced disruption leaves lingering symptoms
As an expert in educational research across a range of domains and methodologies, with a strong focus on equity issues in educational policy and practices, Professor Gannon says “school attrition and school refusal have been impacted by years of pandemic-induced disruption”, with some parents becoming used to their children not attending school.
“After the isolation of school lockdowns in 2020, many young people were bored at home and desperate to return to their friends and the stability and stimulation of everyday life and learning at school,” she says. “Yet continuing disruptions from rolling lockdowns and teacher shortages meant that their school was far from normal.”
To counter the flow-on effect of these unique circumstances, she says “our research with students, teachers and parents on pandemic education impacts suggests that educating for well-being and resilience must be prioritised alongside academic outcomes”.
“Learning is a collaborative, relational process that relies on trust, a sense of safety and the nurturing environment of school communities that focus on creating conditions within which every young person can flourish.”
The delivery of the educational experience should be re-examined
She told EducationDaily that, even when the cohort of children most directly impacted by the negative consequences of pandemic-related lockdowns move through their educational journey, the “conditions, purposes and experiences of schooling need to be reconsidered”.
“Learning ‘loss’ in literacy and numeracy terms seemed not to be as significant as loss of connectedness, relationships and trust. These seem to be resetting over time,” she says. “It’s impossible to tell yet what the continuing legacy of pandemic lockdowns will be, however student engagement and well-being must be prioritised alongside academic outcomes.”
But the pandemic isn’t the only factor influencing young people to avoid school.
Some students who were bullied or subjected to harassment reported feeling safer by not being at school, while some parents who felt that their children’s individual learning needs were not being adequately addressed at school found ways to cater for them at home.
“However, this was limited to those few families that had resources and knowledge to be able to do this adequately,” Professor Gannon told EducationDaily. “Many families did not have resources to ensure their children could learn well away from school and it is likely that those who were most disadvantaged are those who are disconnecting at greater rates.”
Teachers also feel the flow-on
When it comes to the impact on teachers – especially graduate teachers who entered the workforce to move straight into the virtual teaching world – Professor Gannon says she her research did not cover their experience.
When her study interviewed teachers who were leaving the profession about their reasons for leaving, she says “they talked about the need for stable conditions of employment, adequate staffing including specialist support staff, manageable workloads in the face of increased volume of administrative tasks, necessary focus on both student learning and student well-being/ mental health/ resilience, respect for the profession from the wider community – also care for the well-being and resilience of teaching workforce”.
To better support educators, students and their families and minimise the impact of school refusal and absenteeism, Professor Gannon says there needs to be a “renewed focus on relevance, connectedness, relationships as integral to effective learning experiences and academic outcomes”.
Sharpening our focus on addressing inadequacies, inequities and gaps in school staffing, school funding arrangements and other structural features that pre-existed and were exacerbated by the pandemic is vital, she says.
“Schools can reach out to families and endeavour to connect with their communities so that parents and teachers feel they are engaged together in the shared project of supporting young people’s development and their pathways to their futures.”
Re-thinking schools is overdue
Monash University’s Dr Pamela Patrick is a lecturer in the School of Educational Psychology and Counselling and says, “students report feeling disconnected with teachers and teachers’ burnout rates are at an all-time high”.
She has worked as a school psychologist supporting adolescents and the school community with a range of mental health concerns, including school non-attendance, and undertaken research involving issues relating to teacher burnout, compassion fatigue and school non-attendance.
“Emerging data from a parent-teen study of teens with school non-attendance concerns has revealed that bullying and a disconnect between reality and curriculum taught in classrooms are two major reasons for the rise in school non-attendance rates,” Dr Patrick says.
Increasing teacher workloads play a part
“Add to this, the fact that many found a new way of schooling that suited them fine during the pandemic, bringing into question: ‘Why the need to change?’ Simultaneously, educators are faced with new and evolving demands – school refusal, vaping in schools, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to name a few – have made teaching a more complex profession than previously known.”
These added pressures – with little to no relief – have resulted, she says, in an increasing number of educators preferring to leave the profession altogether.
“At a time when the appeal of school is fast dwindling, it is time we started reimagining our schools.”
With the general consensus for school refusal in Australia and internationally ranging from one – five per cent of school-age children, Dr Patrick says the exact statistics around prevalence rates are “difficult to determine and vary from source to source given that school non-attendance is often not uniformly defined and can be placed together with other issues, such as absenteeism, truancy, etc”.
“From a small-scale study led by a group of Monash academics (yet to be published), the most commonly cited reason amongst teenagers themselves for school non-attendance was bullying and associated mental health challenges arising from it. Other reasons included feeling like their subjects seemed irrelevant and feeling like their absence from school did not make a difference to anyone (i.e., lack of school belonging),” Dr Patrick told EducationDaily.
Time for a cultural shift
In essence, she says home-based learning (as a result of the pandemic) has demonstrated to these students that it is possible to receive an education without necessarily having to face challenging – and what some students find to be potentially toxic – school environments.
“Hence, while it appears that the pandemic caused an avalanche of school non-attendance issues, it is more likely that non-attendance is a by-product of underlying problems, such as school culture and belongingness that existed pre-pandemic. Therefore, in my opinion, until school culture and problems relating to bullying are dealt with more effectively, the issue of school refusal is likely to persist,” she says.
Her related research with teachers reveals there is an urgent call for workloads to be reduced.
“Teachers enjoy being in the classroom and teaching, however, too much of their day is filled with administrative duties that often take the joy out of the job,” she told EducationDaily.
“Since returning from the lockdowns, students have been observed to be emotionally less mature or behave in ways that are developmentally younger than their age compared to previous cohorts. This has resulted in more behavioural and social issues at school that consequently directs resources away from teaching and learning in the classroom, and inevitably leads to increased teacher burnout and attrition rates.”
Families can make a difference too
Parents and care-givers keen to support students, she says, can help by providing more autonomy and flexibility, where possible.
“In our study, students, especially teenagers, indicated how they miss the autonomy of home-based learning,” Dr Patrick says. “Hence, coming up with creative ways to build this into the school calendar could be helpful (e.g., home-based learning every fortnight).”
But parents, she says, also need to be validated for their efforts.
“From a few parents we interviewed, the consistent message from parents was a feeling of being overwhelmed,” she told EducationDaily.
“Getting a child re-engaged with school is a shared responsibility between the student, parent and school. Some parents shared that the school system and notification of a child’s absence from school felt impersonal and tokenistic. Parents would like schools to take a more vested interest in reasons why their child is not attending school rather than simply notify them of the frequency in which their child has not attended school.”
If schools had the resources to have a dedicated team to follow-up on school non-attendance issues, it would benefit everyone involved, Dr Patrick believes.
” A dedicated team will allow for closer connections to be formed with families where school non-attendance is an issue and allows for follow-through and potentially sensitive conversations to be held in confidence, with the student’s best interest at heart.”
