Why Bradford should be worried about absenteeism at its schools - David Behrens

Currently around one child in three in that city does not attend classes regularly. The number has more than doubled since before the first lockdown and is forecast to rise further. If the trajectory continues unchecked, classrooms will be emptier than a suburban church on a Sunday morning.

Bradford is the second worst place in the country for absenteeism and it’s not just secondary schools that are affected; even in their earliest years pupils are adopting the same hybrid working arrangements as their parents – turning up once or twice a week and ostensibly working from home the rest of the time. It has become socially acceptable in some districts.

It’s an unwelcome way of life that Labour homed in on this week. Bradford and cities like it were staring in the face of a lost generation of children, it warned.

Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, spoke of “mending the broken relationship between schools, families and government” and she’s right to target the causes of disengagement, not just the symptoms.

But mending is easier said than done in a city of increasing social isolation, where there are more unemployable people than qualified workers prepared to go there.

Bradford’s disparity is best illustrated by the crisis in its social care department. It can’t recruit or retain enough full-time staff so it relies on agency workers who cost around £2.5m a month. That’s seven times more than five years ago.

As a direct result City Hall is so dramatically overspent that it faces a £68m hole in its budget this year and may have to cut services across the board. So everyone loses.

Everyone, that is, except the agencies who hire out the temporary staff. £30m a year is enough for 1,000 people at £30,000 each, but as of two years ago there were only 300 vacancies – so the mark-up must be astronomical. The council obviously realises this because it has now asked the government to consider an outright ban on agency workers.

Part of the reason for the recruitment shortfall is the ‘inadequate’ rating given by Ofsted eight times in five years to Bradford’s children’s services department. So it’s a city that’s the first choice of no-one with any ambition. Some of those who did sign up but didn’t stay long blamed worsening working conditions and unmanageable caseloads.

Those caseloads will now be swollen by this new epidemic of not going to school. Some of the same families will be involved. It’s a downward spiral from which Bridget Phillipson’s rhetoric offers no escape.

Yet just across the Pennines there is a more practical Labour strategy that might convince disenfranchised communities that the schools system does after all have something to offer them. This is the vision for technical education laid out by the Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham.

It is his policy that schools should offer young people with no interest in academic study the alternative of practical qualifications that would make them immediately employable by local companies – many of whom have lent their names to the idea.

The lure of a proper job with pay and prospects is the best way yet devised of escaping from the vortex of despair that begins with skipping school and ends with a referral to social services. Unfortunately, Labour HQ doesn’t see it that way.

Instead, Ms Phillipson and Keir Starmer speak in the vaguest terms of changing the curriculum, which is what every incoming government does, usually in a way that is incompatible with all the previous changes. Lessons are centralised and distributed in one-size-fits-all packages, like supermarket food. Local preferences are ignored.

Burnham’s ‘Manchester Baccalaureate’ would change that fundamentally. It’s locally relevant, anti-elitist and less easily undone come the next change of government. And as more regions adopt it and shape it to their own jobs markets the more ingrained it will become.

That, of course, is why the Head Office doesn’t want it. It weakens their influence; it takes devolution too far. Yet in a world where one child in three no longer goes to school regularly, something has to change – as fundamentally as it did when we all started staying at home.