If attendance is now a crisis of pupils simply not wanting to come to school, perhaps all we need is a better incentive. Cake, birthdays and a named minibus could surely do the trick says Carl Smith.

Many Happy Returns

I was thinking about naming our minibus – the one we use to pick up absent pupils. I thought ‘Many Happy Returns’ might work, particularly since pupils are more likely to be away on their birthday. Using the same logic, I thought we could go for ‘TGI Friday’ on the grounds that young people seem to be early adopters of the four-day week. Perhaps offering to buy them cake would also work, but, then again, we couldn’t afford the candles.

The current government strategy doesn’t seem to be working. So, it must be our fault, or more precisely the fault of school leaders. According to some [drum roll]… it’s because young people don’t want to go to school anymore. Apparently in the past, they were delighted to come. In the early 2000s children would skip merrily to school, greet the headteacher at the door with a cheesy grin and then sprint to class before you could say, ‘Secretary of State’.

Making school fun Now, every day’s a duvet day.

Being at home is all the rage and all their parents are doing it apparently. Why put up with a fascist regime when you can have a brave new world? No more dark sarcasm in the classroom, hey teacher, leave those kids alone – although it wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about another brick in the wall after the RAAC crisis.

So, let’s start making school more fun. I thought we could convert the canteen into a branch of Nando’s (other chicken restaurants are available) and have SLT dress as Marvel characters at the gate. The assistant head for attendance could be Dr Strange, manipulating time so that pupils arriving at 9.47am could technically be recorded as being present at 8.45am. I’d be Spider-Man, retrieving pupils from their bedrooms without even leaving my office. Captain America would be slightly less useful in a British school, unless he could be retrained as Captain Attendance.

Which might work with Year 7 but what about the harder to reach Year 9s? How about turning the humanities department into an escape room or bringing in therapy alpacas (because therapy dogs are so passé)? Instead of soft starts reluctant pupils could be encouraged to pat the alpaca in tutor time. Now, who wouldn’t get out of bed for that? 

I also thought of changing the curriculum, you know, to make it more relevant. GCSE Fortnite anyone? PE could be replaced with Gladiators; Food Technology could become Deliveroo Studies (other food delivery companies are available); and for those who find mornings particularly difficult, how about GCSE Sleep? I even thought that Shakespeare could be taught through the medium of WhatsApp... Macbeth has left the group... that sort of thing.

Now I’m not sure whether any of this would actually work, but if schools are the problem, then leaders have got to be seen at least trying to find a solution. I think that’s how it works. But responsibility isn’t the same as control and so maybe the government should try working with schools to figure out the solution rather than condemning them for not doing it all by themselves.

Which all means ‘Many Happy Returns’ will be setting off tomorrow morning. It would be nice, however, if, for once, we weren’t expected to pay for the petrol as well.

Carl Smith
Principal at Casterton College Rutland (CCR)

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