Attendance rates improved last year. A 0.3 percentage point decrease in absence. Persistent absence fell by 140,000. The government calls it the biggest improvement in a decade.

So naturally, the response is AI-powered surveillance, increased fines, and threats of prosecution.

In November, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced that every school would receive an Attendance Baseline Improvement Expectation (ABIE), individualised targets calculated by artificial intelligence. Schools that don’t meet them will be “signposted to further support.” Meanwhile, fines for unauthorised absence have jumped from £60 to £80, or £160 if you don’t pay within three weeks. Get two fines in three years and you’re looking at magistrates court, possible £2,500 fines, maybe three months in prison.

Last year, 487,000 penalty notices were issued to parents.

The Deficit Playbook Goes Digital

The government frames persistent absence as a crisis requiring urgent intervention. The ABIE system is deficit ideology with a tech upgrade. Instead of blaming individual parents, we can now use algorithms to blame individual schools.

The system crashed within days of launch. Headteachers who’d spent hours reviewing their reports found the attendance figures were wrong. The AI-selected “similar schools” for comparison? Not similar at all.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT, called it a “Whitehall diktat.” Keziah Featherstone from the Headteachers’ Roundtable was blunt: the AI targets will have “very little impact” because schools are already “flat out trying to improve attendance.”

Even the people meant to implement this system can see it’s not fit for purpose.

You can’t AI your way out of systemic inequity. You can’t algorithm your way out of poverty. You can’t data-dashboard your way out of the fact that for many children, school is an unsafe place.

But if you locate the problem in individual schools, you never have to ask why the system produces these patterns in the first place.

The Punishment Paradox

Here’s a number worth sitting with: 487,000. That’s how many penalty notices were issued to parents last year.

We got a 0.3 percentage point improvement in persistent absence rates.

A massive punitive infrastructure, hundreds of thousands of fines, court threats, police involvement, and the result is marginal movement. If this apparatus was effective, we’d expect better returns. Instead, we’ve seen escalation. Fines increased. The threat of prosecution made explicit. Two strikes and you’re in court.

Parents report community police officers knocking on doors. Highly anxious children hiding from truant officers. Pupils told “if you don’t come in, your mum or dad will go to prison.” MPs heard testimony describing it as “Dickensian.”

Consider who we’re punishing. Children with Education, Health and Care Plans have an absence rate of 12%. They’re seven times more likely to miss over half of their school sessions than their peers. Free school meal-eligible pupils are four times more likely to have severe absences.

We are issuing fines and deploying police to families whose children have documented disabilities and whose poverty is verified by their eligibility for free meals.

This isn’t solving anything. It’s criminalising people already underserved by the systems meant to support them.

These aren’t isolated stories. SEND mum Jo Clayton has written a script for a short film, “Unauthorised Absence,” backed by an alliance of academics, paediatricians, educators, and lawyers. The film aims to expose “the entrapment in an underfunded education system that fails to recognise children’s needs, and the disastrous impact of attendance fines.” Families are organizing to tell their own stories because nobody else will.

What We’re Really Measuring

Every statistic points to systemic causes. Fifty-seven percent of persistently absent children are eligible for free school meals. Children with mental health conditions miss almost three times more school. Special schools have a 12% absence rate.

The government’s own research acknowledges the feedback loop between attendance and mental health. University of Manchester researchers found that “school absence isn’t just about skipping lessons: it’s often a sign that families are struggling.”

So what’s being measured as “improvement”? Are fewer children living in poverty? Have CAMHS waiting lists decreased? Can local authorities now meet their statutory deadlines for EHC Plans?

No. We’re measuring whether bodies showed up to buildings.

The government’s attendance mentor programme reaches 2.5% of children with persistent absence. Mental Health Support Teams might cover 60% of pupils when fully rolled out. Meanwhile, CAMHS waiting lists stretch for years.

Research tells us to “rebuild trust” and “make schools more welcoming places.” But you can’t mandate trust. You can’t fine your way to it. And you can’t surveil your way to belonging.

Not Fine in School, a parent-led organization with over 76,000 members, lists what families report as barriers: “unmet Special Educational Needs, bullying, poor mental health, physical health conditions, disabilities, poverty, bereavement, duties as a young carer, excessive academic pressure, overly strict behaviour policies, a missing sense of belonging, and an irrelevant curriculum.”

When a child with severe anxiety refuses to attend school, that’s their nervous system telling them they’re not safe. When children with undiagnosed SEND are absent, that’s a school that can’t meet their needs. When working-class children miss school because they can’t afford uniform or transport or period products, that’s systemic violence.

Who Deserves Care, Who Deserves Control

The groups most punished are the groups most marginalized. Working-class children. Disabled children. Children in poverty. Children with mental health needs.

These patterns are not accidental: an accident would suggest that the outcomes are somehow unpredictable and random, but the consequences are wholly predictable.

Here’s what we’ve actually done. We’ve systematically defunded the services that support families. Cut school nurses, youth workers, family hubs. Created a SEND system that can’t meet demand. Allowed the cost of living to devastate working-class communities while keeping school costs high.

And then we criminalize the predictable results.

We could see absence as a safeguarding issue requiring support. We could interpret persistent absence as evidence that a child needs help, not punishment.

Instead, we issue fines to families who can’t afford them. We threaten prosecution of parents whose children are documented as disabled. We send police to knock on doors of families whose poverty we’ve verified through their free school meal eligibility.

This is about protecting institutions from having to change, not protecting children from harm.

Fix the System, Not the Child

The children swimming upstream aren’t the problem. The current is.

We are the system. Every one of us working in education makes choices every day about what we measure, what we value, what we punish, what we protect. We can choose differently.

Stop asking “How do we get children to comply?” Start asking “What are children resisting?”

Stop asking “How do we track them better?” Start asking “Why don’t they feel safe here?”

The 600,000 children targeted by attendance and behaviour interventions don’t need better tracking. They don’t need bigger fines. They don’t need AI-powered targets or ambassadors for compliance.

They need education that doesn’t require them to survive it.

They need schools that see their absence as information, not defiance. They need systems that ask what’s happening to them, not what’s wrong with them. They need us to trust their resistance as data about what we’re doing wrong, not evidence of what’s broken in them. At Class 13 we are working to build those schools.

We already know what doesn’t work. Surveillance and criminalisation don’t create the conditions for learning or growth or safety.

What we haven’t tried is measuring what actually matters. What we haven’t tried is fixing the system instead of the child.

The current is the problem. And we have the power to change the direction of the water.