The rise in children being absent from school is likely to result in an uptick in crime in the near future, government analysis suggests.
Close to 25% of English children were “persistently absent” from school during the 2022/23 autumn term. This figure is widely understood to largely be a result of the lockdown, since which time the number of pupils missing at least 10% of school time (1.7 million) has roughly doubled. 125,000 children now skip most of their schooling altogether.
Officials are worried that many of those for whom school is now a foreign country will wind up committing crimes. The Times, citing a new study, reported that as many as 9,000 more young offenders, including 2,000 violent criminals, could be on the streets by 2027 as a result of absences.
Andy Cook, chief executive of the Centre for Social Justice think tank that produced the analysis, commented:
Alongside stunting academic attainment, children with a history of school absence are around three times more likely to commit an offence than those who routinely attend school.
For the sake of these children’s future—and for the safety of our streets—[the] government must stop tinkering around the edges and accelerate the national rollout of attendance mentors, ensuring all children benefit from an education that sets them up for life.
Increased school absences are on the extreme end of the lockdown’s impact on children. Dozens of reports have pointed to all kinds of other issues that have permanently tarred a generation of young people. After being prevented by the Conservative government, willfully supported by the Labour opposition, from entering formal educational settings and from simply socialising with their peers, more children—even those who are older—have been anxious about making friends; young people, used to seeing people wearing masks, have needed “reassurance” to “cope with seeing different faces.” They have even needed more help with the basics, including blowing their nose.
All these impacts are not, of course, exclusive to Britain. A disheartening 2020 report from the charitable organisation Save The Children suggested that around ten million children worldwide may never return to school following the lockdown. CEO Kevin Watkins described this as “an unprecedented education emergency and governments must urgently invest in learning.”
Yet in Britain, which enjoys complimenting itself on its position in the world, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan is only just “beginning an attendance drive over the summer.” That is according to The Times, which was told by “allies” of the senior government figure that she saw absence as “a really dangerous hangover from the pandemic” and was making tackling it “a top priority.”
Arabella Skinner, from child advocacy group UsForThem, said she was “stunned” that the government was only just looking to turn this harmful situation around, telling The European Conservative:
This has been warned about since the start of the pandemic and raised by the Education Select Committee two years ago. We need solutions which are commensurate with the scale of the problem, and our children need this now.
Those children who are now staying away from schools have already been failed by the government under its lockdown policies, and are also more likely to come from homes with unsupportive—if at all present—parents.
