School attendance

Sir, – National schools have recently started a poster campaign to highlight the importance of school attendance.

While of course school attendance is vital for children’s learning and education, such campaigns do nothing to reflect the enormous effort some children (and their parents) have to make every single day to simply get themselves to the front door of their schools. These children carry not just their school bags on their backs, but also the burden of anxiety, neurodiversity and mental health disorders which weigh heavily.

I wonder could schools find a way to highlight the unseen efforts these children and their families make to attend, and appreciate that when they don’t, it is not because they won’t, it is because they can’t.

Instead of highlighting absenteeism, perhaps time could be better spent asking these children and their parents what they need to make attendance at school more possible, and for the Department of Education to truly commit to resourcing them to do so. – Yours, etc,