Number of chronic absences from school has more than doubled post-covid

More than a quarter of primary schoolchildren, and more than a fifth of post-primary students missed at least a month of school days during the 2022/23 school year. 

In her first statement to the Dáil as Minister for Education, Helen McEntee pledged to reverse a trend worrying inspectors and social workers across the country — despite a return to normality, the proportion of children chronically absent from school has more than doubled post-covid.

Before the pandemic, absences from schools had been dropping but despite a return to normality, more than a quarter of primary schoolchildren, and more than a fifth of post-primary students missed at least a month of school days during the 2022/23 school year. 

For comparison, the respective figures stood at 10% and 15% before the pandemic.

The figure is even higher again in disadvantaged schools, with 42% of children attending Deis primary schools missing 20 days or more in 2022/23. At post-primary, 30% of students missed 20 days or more.

It’s possible that alarm bells didn’t quite ring like they should have when it first emerged that absences soared. 

Across education, politics, and wider society, there was much understandable concern around children’s wellbeing following consecutive lockdowns, both socially and developmentally. 

Public health advice had relied heavily on parents keeping and sending children home from school when they had virus symptoms.

The Education (Welfare) Act legally obliges schools to report any child who misses 20 school days or more to Tusla, the Child and Family Agency. 

As parents are ultimately responsible in the eyes of the law for ensuring their child receives an education, a breach of the Act carries with it a fine of up to €1,000 and a month in jail if convicted. 

In September 2020, a time of heightened anxiety around the reopening of schools, Tusla told the Irish Examiner it would be able to differentiate between the absences caused by covid and chronic absenteeism.

Anton O’Mahony is the principal of Skibbereen Community College and president of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (NAPD). During covid, schooling and education went down the pecking order, he believes.

“It became OK not to be at school. It was OK at 2pm to be out helping your father on the farm or to be online with your friends or to be out in the park with your friends during the school day.”

That has had a knock-on effect on attitudes, he added: “We survived then; we’ll survive again.”

From his own experience, and the experience of other post-primary principals he represents, another issue tends crop up — anxiety.

“The thing about anxiety is that it’s often undiagnosed. It’s something we can’t diagnose as a school so it’s a difficult one then to deal with because you’ve to try and get to the bottom of it, what is it that the child is anxious about?”

Left unaddressed, it can create a vicious circle.

“Imagine at second level,” Anton explained. “Where you’ve a number of different subjects every day and you miss two or three days.

“When you go into a class the next day, you feel behind because they’ve moved on to something else. You’ve missed a basic building block.”

If you’ve missed a basic building block, when you go into class you feel overwhelmed. So now the overwhelm is increasing because you’ve missed out.

“More overwhelm leads to more anxiety. More anxiety leads to avoidance of that subject and then avoidance of the school and eventually that leads to school refusal.

“It’s hard to resolve and you’ve got to remember as well, it’s hard for parents. They are at home, and they have to try and persuade this child to go to school and they are going to work themselves.

“We have to work very closely with parents on this.”

While anxiety may play a bigger role in teenagers not attending school, principal Conor McCarthy points to the level of control younger children have over whether they attend school. 

As principal of Tallaght Community National School, Conor is part of a group of principals working in the most disadvantaged area in the country campaigning for more support for their students. 

He believes there are a couple of important factors driving the increases and a lot of it has to do with adults.

“The real reason the Government is scared of this is because it’s not just Deis schools, or special schools,” he said. 

“It’s absolutely across the board. Every single school has plummeted attendance-wise wise and Deis schools have been worse but it's affecting middle, lower, upper-class schools, everywhere. 

“What I would hear from parents a bit is ‘I don’t want to send them in when they are sick because they will spread it’. I can’t ever remember that in the past.”

More parents also work from home now, he added.

“I think that is underrated. If parents had to go to work and there was nobody to mind those children, they’d be sending them in.”

Lots of middle-class families also now choose to holiday during the school year, he points out.

“That’s a big change from the past. If someone goes on holiday for a week during the school year, that’s five days they miss.

“That is one quarter of their allocation that they can miss during the school year without their attendance being classified as chronic absenteeism.

“At primary school level, it’s all about the adults. We can run any number of initiatives in school.

“We can send parents notices about attendance every month, and we do all these things anyway, but I’m doubtful about how effective they are.”

Tusla and changes to referral process

While he believes there is more room to be a little more “black and white” about attendance with parents, he is also keen to stress Tusla’s role. 

“I think the referral process has changed and Tusla is requiring schools to do all of this intervention work before they will investigate a case of absenteeism or before the educational welfare officer will become involved.

“If a child is missing a certain amount of days, and I want to flag this with Tusla and say ‘hey, this is a child that has missed 25 days and I’m not satisfied with that the explanations are legitimate and there are questions to be answered here’ — I can’t refer them until Tusla sees that I’ve engaged a huge amount of strategies before they take on the case.”

Strategies that were in place from around 2006 to improve attendance were having an effect, he stresses.

“Deis schools were improving their attendance.”

But missing days can have a snowball effect: “Missing school makes you more nervous about coming into school. 

“You don’t know if you are sitting in the same seat, if they’ve moved, or if there’s a trip that day.”

“If the class has started a new song or changed something — it’s harder for you to make friends if you are consistently skipping school because you are slightly less likely to know the person beside you or in the yard.

“One day a week doesn’t sound like much but that’s 36 days a year if you are missing all of those days. It impacts massively on you socially and how you develop relationships.”