When it became normalized/encouraged for students to stay home if they feel sick, even if the symptoms were not observable to parents, there are certain students who really struggled /still struggle to use this power responsibly and have started to use it to avoid any anticipated negative interaction at school. Spotty attendance records are way up, and would you be surprised there is an overrepresentation of these types of absences on test days, or even local “feeling sick” for the blocks where there might be an assignment due?
Can you expand on this? It's not something I'm familiar with and over here we pretty much still pack the kids off to school if they're not showing an abnormal temperature on thermometer.
Well for several years when schools were in session during the pandemic, students were (correctly) encouraged to stay home if they had any symptoms that could be consistent with having covid. However, many of these symptoms are not detectable by any exterior evaluation, like fatigue, body aches, headache, or nausea.
As a result there has been a subset of students who have taken advantage of that ambiguity and used it to stay home when they are otherwise well for many different reasons.
Ahh I see. I'm not aware of that having been a trend here but could be outside the circles involved. The majority of focus I hear on schools at the moment is teacher's strikes, particularly because they're probably the strongest union and most damaging strikes to do in the UK. Schools act as childcare allowing people to work, without schools people also stop working so a teachers strike effectively causes a knock-on general strike of sorts. Could be that this organising is overshadowing these kinds of trends being talked about.
Can you expand on this? It's not something I'm familiar with and over here we pretty much still pack the kids off to school if they're not showing an abnormal temperature on thermometer.
Well for several years when schools were in session during the pandemic, students were (correctly) encouraged to stay home if they had any symptoms that could be consistent with having covid. However, many of these symptoms are not detectable by any exterior evaluation, like fatigue, body aches, headache, or nausea.
As a result there has been a subset of students who have taken advantage of that ambiguity and used it to stay home when they are otherwise well for many different reasons.
Ahh I see. I'm not aware of that having been a trend here but could be outside the circles involved. The majority of focus I hear on schools at the moment is teacher's strikes, particularly because they're probably the strongest union and most damaging strikes to do in the UK. Schools act as childcare allowing people to work, without schools people also stop working so a teachers strike effectively causes a knock-on general strike of sorts. Could be that this organising is overshadowing these kinds of trends being talked about.
Yeah honestly I don't think most people are aware of this pattern, which is why I mentioned it.