Why do school staff visit the homes of absent pupils?

The latest incident of school shaming reveals widespread ignorance of schools' safeguarding responsibilities

A tragedy which changed how school leaders think about absent pupils

In April 2017, the senior coroner of St Pancras Coroner’s Court published a Prevention of Future Deaths report following the death of Chadrack Mbala Mulo, a four-year-old boy who had died the previous year in Hackney. Coroners have a statutory duty to make a Prevention of Future Death report where it is believed that action should be taken to prevent further deaths.¹

The coroner reported that:

Chadrack had learning difficulties and, when his mother died unexpectedly at home on 1 or 2 October 2016, he did not know how to call for help or feed himself properly. He died a fortnight later of dehydration and starvation. He was then found within approximately 48 hours.

According to the coroner, when Chadrack was absent from school, staff at the school…

…were concerned and rang his mother on several occasions. They also visited the home twice, but could not gain access to the block of flats where Chadrack and his mother lived.

The report was sent to the Minister of State for Vulnerable Children and Families at the Department of Education. It described the precautions that Chadrack’s school were now taking to ensure that such a tragedy could never be repeated. These included immediately sending a member of staff to a child’s home when a child unexpectedly fails to attend and no relevant adult can be contacted. The report states that the school’s new policy means that:

If there is no answer at the family home when staff members attend, they now immediately contact the police, who in most cases are likely to force entry.

The coroner concluded:

This protocol seems very sensible, but is clearly driven by the appalling tragedy of Chadrack’s death. It seems unlikely that other schools in Hackney, elsewhere in London, or indeed in the rest of England & Wales, have such a system in place.

A response to the report a minister from the Department for Education stated:

You make an important distinction in your report between attendance issues and welfare issues and underline that school staff should be considering welfare when managing attendance. In this area too, the Department will examine how best we can update attendance and safeguarding guidance to make this link clearer.

I would anticipate that guidance will continue to make clear that professional judgement should be used in deciding when child safety or welfare concerns should be escalated to children's social care services and/or the police. I have also asked the Department to identify the best way to reinforce this point further in the attendance and safeguarding guidance.

I will ensure that changes to strengthen the guidance will be made at the earliest opportunity, subject to formal consultation on the safeguarding guidance.

A Multi-Agency Case Review into Chadrack’s death was published in March 2018². It noted that:

…whilst the school responded to Chadrack’s absence in line with the non-statutory guidance on school attendance, the primary focus of this guidance is predicated on getting children back into education. This is clearly illustrated in the opening pages of this document:

“Central to raising standards in education and ensuring all pupils can fulfil their potential is an assumption so widely understood that it is insufficiently stated – pupils need to attend school regularly to benefit from their education. Missing out on lessons leaves children vulnerable to falling behind. Children with poor attendance tend to achieve less in both primary and secondary school.”

School Attendance, DfE 2016 (p4)

In the opinion of the review, the guidance is weak insofar as it lacks sufficient emphasis on protection, simply referencing on page 8 that schools should follow up absences to “ensure the proper safeguarding action is taken”. In this sense, the whole culture that underpins this process is not one that prioritises the active consideration of safeguarding in the wider context of a child’s life. This lack of focus is likely to have been reflected in the actions of staff…

Recommendation … a stronger focus on safeguarding [should be] reflected in both the statutory and non-statutory guidance that relates to school attendance.

What the attendance guidance for schools now says about safeguarding

While I haven’t studied the older documents to see how much was changed at that time, I can confirm that the current attendance guidance states that all schools are expected to:

…Make sure attendance support and improvement is appropriately resourced… Where possible this should include attendance or pastoral support staff (either school based or contracted) who can work with families, conduct home visits and work in partnership with school leaders, the local authority’s School Attendance Support Team and other partners.

Schools are also expected to:

…Recognise children missing education can act as a vital warning sign to a range of safeguarding issues including neglect, sexual abuse and child sexual and criminal exploitation…

How home visits about attendance became a big deal this week

The reason I am exploring the connection between attendance and safeguarding, and in particular the reasons that schools visit the homes of absent pupils, is because of the latest school shaming. A school, that had been one of the most challenging schools in England³, recently shared a video about expectations regarding absence. In the video, the principal said the following:

I'm here to talk about attendance, which is really important to help your child learn, but then earn later in life. I'm reporting this week's record attendance at [the school], but I'm also noticing some families that are making choices that are not helping their child succeed or gain the benefits of social and emotional connections that they gain at school with staff and peers.

For example, there are some holidays during term time, and there are holidays that are happening leading up to Easter. What parents are doing is they're saying it's an illness, but actually, the car is now no longer in the drive, the bins no longer moving around the house, and there's no activity in the house over a few days. So, we're putting this down as an unauthorised holiday, and we're issuing a fine.

There's a scam that parents have engaged in where they've changed the name on the number of the phones to say ‘doctor's surgery’. It isn’t the doctors calling us; we know that this is a scam, so it's an unauthorized absence.

We're also noticing an increasing number of parents trying to collect their child in the school day to go to the pharmacy. The pharmacies are open outside of school hours. This is disrupting education, and the thing is, we don't miss a second; every single second is well used here in this school. We don't show videos; we don't waste time. Therefore, it's important that every moment and every day a child's engaged in learning in school. So, let's engage with school; let's work with us so that we can succeed, and we can go to university or a real alternative.

No doubt, there’s room for debate about whether school leaders should be this open about the problems they have with parents. I favour honesty and I suspect an approach based on appeasing the most irresponsible parents would prevent many of the improvements the school leaders must make. Also, the guidance on attendance states that schools should:

Set high expectations for the attendance and punctuality of all pupils and communicate these regularly to pupils and parents through all available channels. In doing so, schools should help parents to understand what is expected of them and why attendance is important to their child’s attainment, wellbeing, and wider development. It should also include clarity on the short and long term consequences of poor attendance.

Additionally, the guidance recommends that schools “challenge parents’ views where they have misconceptions about what ‘good’ attendance looks like”. That said, I understand why many schools, particularly schools in less challenging circumstances, would be less open about this. The desire not to provoke a confrontation with parents is understandable where schools do not require a drastic and immediate improvement in expectations.

However, what is far harder to comprehend, have been reactions to this video from those who think that the following are unusual and outrageous:

1. School staff challenging parents who take their children on holiday in term time or lie to them;

2. School staff visiting the homes of absent children;

3. School staff noticing when children are not at home.

This is not the first time a school has been shamed for doing normal things, or for admitting they do normal things. Schools are held responsible for absences, so, of course, point 1 is normal. If you think that parents should be free to let their kids skip school then campaign for the law to be changed, don’t have a go at one school for following it.

As for points 2 and 3, I hope it is clear that this is a normal part of safeguarding. Point 2 is what schools do in cases where absence is unexplained, or excessive. I’ve been in multiple schools where staff made home visits, and often what they discovered was very concerning. Sometimes parents were in circumstances where support from social services was desperately needed. Sometimes parents have given up any pretence of parenting and indulge their child’s every whim, in which case school staff must explain how to be an adult.

As for point 3, in the aftermath of Chadrack Mbala Mulo’s death, his school resolved to call the police to force entry whenever there was no response from the home of an absent child. As extreme as that is, there is no denying that if it appears a child missing from school is not at home, it could indicate any number of potential safeguarding problems. Of course, those visiting homes look for signs of life in the house. We know that the school staff visiting Chadrack’s home left when there was no response, while he starved to death inside.

Shaming a school for safeguarding

It’s difficult to believe how deranged some edutwitter commentary about the absence video was. Some tweeters seemed to think the school’s principal must have personally visited the houses of the families he mentioned. Several imagined that he must have spent time monitoring houses and examining bins⁴. I even saw claims that he was conducting illegal surveillance. Of course, Twitter is mad at the best of times. However, I do wonder if the way unhinged claims about surveillance go viral tells us something about the paranoid mental state of many Twitter users.⁵

I have been appalled that several media outlets decided to follow up on the edutwitter kerfuffle, apparently as oblivious to normal attendance practices and safeguarding concerns as the denizens of bonkers-edutwitter. The BBC and the Guardian, in particular, should have known better, but there were plenty of others. However, my greatest contempt has to be for the National Education Union, whose leader’s malicious accusations of “snooping” appeared in the media coverage. Education is increasingly becoming a sector where anyone doing their job and admitting in public that they do their job, is at risk of being vilified. This seems particularly unfair when some of what is being criticised is required because it is believed that it could prevent a future tragedy.

1. A more recent example of a coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths report was the one following the death of headteacher Ruth Perry. The coroner in that case wrote a Prevention of Future Deaths Report directed to the Secretary of State for Education and Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector.

2. A couple of months earlier, the BBC reported on another case involving the sudden death of a parent.

'The kids were left with my dead husband'

A bereaved mother is calling for schools to make extra checks on pupils who do not turn up.

Helen Daykin's little girls spent almost 24 hours with the body of their father after his sudden death.

She says: "There's no reason why this couldn't happen again. How the children didn't hurt themselves I've no idea."

The government may ask schools in England to make extra checks…

3. I have discussed this school in a previous blog post.

4. Curiously, some tweeters seemed to think that it must have required careful examination to establish that the bins weren’t being moved. I can only assume they are not familiar the concept of bin day.

5. Not long ago, substantial parts of edutwitter became convinced (with the help of The Observer) that the Department for Education was monitoring their tweets and keeping files on them.