The total number of students consistently absent has surged to 1.89 million, or roughly a fifth of all pupils. This figure is more than double the pre-pandemic tally of students who frequently skipped school. The Times has more.
More than a quarter of secondary school pupils are regularly missing school, new figures have shown.
The children’s watchdog warned that such absences could “irrevocably break the social contract between schools and families”.
Persistent absence – which is defined as missing at least 10% of school time – hit 28% in secondary schools in England in the 2022-23 academic year, according to figures released by the Department for Education.
The total number of persistently absent pupils rose again to 1.89 million, about 20% of pupils and two and a half times the number that regularly missed school before the pandemic.
The number of pupils who qualify for free school meals who are regularly missing school has tripled from pre-pandemic levels, to 765,000, analysis by the Times shows. For those poorer pupils in secondary schools, persistent absence rates have reached 47%, up from 28% before the pandemic.
The department attributed many of the absences to higher rates of illness, especially during the flu wave at the end of term last autumn.
However, the Education Policy Institute noted that disadvantaged children and those with special educational needs were particularly affected.
Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, told the Times: “The new figures out today lay bare the scale of the school attendance crisis. Three years on from the pandemic, school absences remain at unprecedented highs.
“We are failing to get children back to school. I am concerned that if further action is not taken, we risk normalising disengagement from education and irrevocably breaking the social contract between schools and families.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Teacher Paul Sutton thinks the reason for the sharp rise in persistent absentee-ism is because children lost confidence in teachers after seeing them behave idiotically during the pandemic. His blog post on this is worth reading.
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I can see both sides of this, but it does seem to rely on the victims putting themselves in harms way to prove a point. If it is the provision of ‘normal’ services like a hotel and restaurant menu, then there is a strong case that you should not deny that service. However, this is the creation of a new item (the cake) to order and the clients wishes, then I think as the ‘creative’ you have every right to tell them to get lost if you don’t want to do it. It is not the baking of a cake, but the expression of beliefs and ideology that you cannot countenance. You might imagine that there are plenty of bakers, some who may be gay, who would be happy to do this regardless. This underlines that our hapless victims aren’t looking to buy a cake, but to create a problem for someone who thinks differently to them.
Either we have property rights if we don’t.
If some filthy homeless bod with his flea bitten mutt comes into your hotel or restaurant, you can see him on his way without the Equality Gestapo descending on you.
So we don’t have the rule of law – law equally and equitably applied.
Thanks for this. I expect it will go 6-3 but curious to see who writes the opinion and what it is based on. Roberts and Kavanaugh might be a bit more circumspect than the other four conservative justices.
They already have legally compelled speech in Canada, which Jordan Peterson was so vocal in warning about the consequences of. Of course he was right.
Should a Queer be forced to make my rosary?
Should queers be forced to repair my roof and affix a large cross near my chimney?
Should a Tranny be forced to repair my Christian pendant?
Should a polygender be forced to bake a Christian themed cake for my wedding ceremony?
Should a Black Muslim be forced to repair my Church steeple?
Should a Black Christian be forced to provide doors for the local mosque?
Should an atheist-shit happenser be forced to provide goods and signage for an Easter procession?
If not Flock off then.
Who isn’t sick and tired of the mentally and sexually ill and perverse cult. Shove it all back up the anal pipe. The sickness reeks.
Meanwhile NATO and Russia appear to be edging towards a nuclear confrontation and our monetary system is in the process of collapsing.
Nero fiddles while Rome burns.
I was always taught in medicine that I had a right to refuse treatment to a patient, unless in an emergency situation, where my personal beliefs/ relationship with the patient may affect the quality of treatment I may provide, as long as I was able to recommend another practitioner.
Could it not be argued that if the baker was “forced” to bake a cake for a client whose personal habits/ lifestyle the baker was opposed to, the quality of the cake may be suboptimal and therefore a referral to an alternate baker would be appropriate?
Indeed. I think I read somewhere (not sure about this), in one of the cake cases, the baker offered to bake and sell the cake, did not want to decorate it as requested, but offered the decoration materials to the customer to do that themselves. This strikes me as more than enough to establish that the issue was not discrimination as such. It was about someone with a chip on their shoulder trying to abuse someone else’s rights, just because the zeitgeist right now is to venerate victimhood. They should remember that the pendulum always swings back.
These stupid, petty actions only serve to turn people against the group these whack jobs purport to serve and represent. As overloaded as courts claim they are, perhaps it’s time to use the laws on malicious prosecution and abuse of process to greater effect.
You mean senna pod and exlax icing?
It’s a sorry state of affairs when these kinds of things end up in a court of law. But let’s forget about the legal system for a moment; we know the legal system often works against societies best interests – we see that time and again. If society would be left to judge then these cases would never even be considered, let alone heard. Why? If people are left to be, without interference from authority, a civil, decent society would organically be built around what is reasonable. Tolerance should not be without limits, and those limits would be based around compromise.
What we have today, and this has been an exponentially growing problem since the 60s, is a number of victim groups achieving their perfectly reasonable goal, but then deciding to shift the goalposts. Moving those goalposts further and further away away from compromise, driven by some narcissistic, ill conceived, mistaken motivation of a twisted idea of revenge. These victim groups are neither reasonable nor interested in compromise, and the law has actually supported their increasingly deranged and antisocial demands.
The question of what is reasonable, and is there willing to compromise, should always sit at the heart of a civil society.
“the legal system often works against societies best interests”
True. However the way the US structured their government with checks and balances was designed to prevent tyranny and to prevent the dictatorship of the majority. The selection of US Supreme Court justices has become highly politicised, I would argue because of the way “liberal” (leftist) justices have used their power to invent rights that the original framers of the constitution and the people who adopted it NEVER intended it to grant. In general the court has tended to extend supposed rights in a leftward direction. The current court IMO is closer to an honest interpretation of the constitution which was actually quite limited in scope – a wise choice. Other matters should be left to the legislature, elected by the people.
Agree that the US Constitution was designed to always place the ultimate power with the people. However, that looks to have been ridden over roughshod in the last couple of years. Back here in good old Blighty we have nothing of the sort, at least nothing that’s taken seriously; the power is ultimately with those that are granted governance by the people. From what I can see though, it mattered not one iota what political system you lived under in the last couple of years, every single one adopted a totalitarian, dictatorship. We must enact change.
I don’t know about cases brought in state or federal circuit courts but the Supreme Court did overturn at least one vaccine mandate, and I think disappointingly left another in place. I don’t recall many, if any, cases that came before them regarding restriction of movement. Perhaps the whole mechanism moves too slowly for that, in general, or perhaps no-one brought the right kind of case and pushed it through the lower courts.
The issue that I see here needs to be considered in a wider context – the division of the populace against itself. A divided populace is more easily governed and controlled.
To stifle growing awareness that elites are perpetuating and increasing their powerbase, lesser issues are thrown like bread to the starving. They fight amongst themselves over the bread rather than those who control its supply.
What is happening here is submission to the judgement of those who control, via the legal system. While fighting for rights and freedoms amongst ourselves, we submit to judgement from an elite class. There needs to be a return to natural law and equitable judgment by peers whether or not a trespass or crime has been committed.
Oh for goodness sake, PayPal is something of a straw man here. The issue with PayPal is that as a financial services provider they should not be interested in the beliefs of their customers as these beliefs are not material to the service being provided. In my opinion, financial service providers need to comply with the law and only deny service when the law tells them to. Trying to conflate this with the creation of an item (cake or otherwise) with which the creator disagrees is quite e misleading, and adds nothing to the argument.
Plenty of garages have refused to repair my Alfa Romeo because they don’t have the right skills etc, and I have the responsibility to find a suitable vendor, not to sue the garage who says they can’t or won’t do it.
I disagree. The matter of the beliefs of their customers might be argued to be material to a financial services company. I’m not sure of the specifics, but I imagine you could find hawala banks that only accept Muslims as customers, for instance. I could imagine other scenarios. It would be of greater relevance, perhaps, to a small closely-held company.
Also, one of the things PayPal said when they closed our account was that we had to remove all their branding from the website. This leads me to think that one of the arguments they’ve made to government is that when they provide the service, their branding is visible on the websites of their customers, so their brand image is at risk. In that sense, they could argue the beliefs of their customers are material, although I’d argue it’s a trivial problem and much less of one if it’s known that these companies can’t exclude people on their political beliefs.
As soon as you accept these specious arguments from PayPal, you are lost. Also a Muslim bank, as any other bank, has the right to accept or decline your business, unlike PayPal who accept anybody then enforce censorship afterwards.
I don’t accept those arguments at all – what I said was that PayPal might or could make them. We don’t know what they’ve been saying behind closed doors to ministers and civil servants. I’m intending to expand on these questions in the future, but speaking of English common law and later US law, there are good precedents for government regulation of monopoly or quasi-monopoly companies (to make them open and non-discriminatory) as being “affected with the publick interest” or as “common carriers”, etc. These arguments are being worked out by the likes of Richard A. Epstein, Eugene Volokh, Christopher Yoo and Justice Thomas as we progress (and there’s currently no solid agreement), but the principle would conceivably apply just as much to payment services as social media platforms.
We’re heading into new territory, and I’m hoping the US will lead the way. Justice Thomas has specifically welcomed a case testing these kinds of theories, and it may well be that if this happens that the effects will ripple out into the UK and Europe if its successful. We may end up in the position where all one would need to do to be immune from stupid EU and UK hate speech laws would be to use a VPN to access social media from the US.
The same constraints that are applied to payment service providers need also apply to the government in its introduction of CBDCs in order that they are prevented from suspending citizens’ access to finance other than by an individual, specific legal order.
Completely agree. Remember that English guy who got all his assets and bank accounts frozen, at the whim of the minister, because he was making videos for the Russians? That kind of thing is terrifying. OK, so he may be a war criminal or human rights abuser for doing that interview with Aidan Aslan in prison that was, we now know from Aslan, done under duress – but that was never proven in court. No-one except Toby stood up for him as far as I know (although I haven’t checked) because what he’s doing isn’t popular, but those are often the most important cases, and where our civil liberties get eroded.
“Get the flock out of here!”
Why CAUSE trouble?
Go to a manufacturer who doesn’t mind your request and stop goading those who do.
Can’t we just be tolerant of each person’s beliefs?
If I were the prospective purchaser of a creative product (cake or web site in this case) I would be inclined to think I would get a better end result if it wasn’t made under duress.
Would you trust a cake made by someone you believed was hostile to you, and who was forced to make the cake for you? Would you dare eat the cake?!
If you were a gay customer buying a cake from a Christian cake shop owner whom you believed had an antipathy towards gay people, would you pray that the cake shop owner was Christian enough not to put anything disgusting into the cake?!
Or would you get the cake from another shop instead?
Wrong question. Should anybody be forced to use their property and labour output for anything?
Are we back to slavery and no property Rights?
I’m fed up of the religious argument, it’s a general Common Law argument, nothing to do with religion.
And if Mr Christian can get an exemption on religious grounds but Mr Atheist cannot, isn’t that discrimination?
The core legal argument is not a “free exercise of religion” argument at all. In fact, religion is purely secondary, but it’s useful to show that she has a sincerely-held belief on the matter. It’s really about one of the other parts of the 1stA. Also, I think one has to bear in mind that it tends to end up with religious people on the other end because they get targeted on account of their known views. However, there are probably lots of other cases out there which don’t involve religion, but for whatever reason they haven’t been selected as the test case by the Alliance Defending Freedom. I believe that on this issue there were other cases (though I’d have to check), and the ADF would have gone through a selection process before pouring their resources into a case.
Ridiculous. Would ‘they’ accept the opposite? Find a trans baker, order a cake that says “Trans women are not women, and their rights do not supersede everyone else’s”
I see nothing wrong about a cake with Eric and Ernie on the top.
It’s not difficult to legally force a business owner to provide a service such as a hotel room without discriminating against anyone.
But how can you force someone to be creative? Suppose you were in the business of creating advertising and clever slogans, etc, and you were well and truly “anti trans”, and suppose you were FORCED to create slogans for a trans organisation, what kind of slogans would you creatively come up with? The mind boggles! Maybe apparently pro-trans slogans with hidden anti-trans messages:
“Trans women are women every bit as much as normal women.”
“Women are statistically more like to be raped by men than by trans women.”
“A trans woman with a penis isn’t a man, even if she has fathered five children.”
more likely, not ‘more like’.
Set the price of the order so high that the “customer” declines.
There was an episode of friends where someone asked a character – Phoebe – to do something and she said
Phoebe : “Oh, I wish I could, but I don’t want to.”
What has happened to choice? Why make, or attempt to make, someone to do something if they don’t want to?
As a web designer or a cake designer have talents that are above the mainstream I can’t see why they can’t subtly introduce their own values into any project they take on. Maybe a bit of satire in the design?
Sure not an idea situation but the back code of the website can reflect the builders views without the commissioner knowing it’s there (otherwise they would build the site themselves), as an example metadata in a digital photograph contains lots of information that the average user never sees.
It wouldn’t be too hard for the cake icer to ice in words that reflect their views ‘hidden in plain sight’ either.
Does he also have to make a cake in support of lowering the age of consent? Not so different from what happened in Northern Ireland with Ashers bakery, where so-called same-sex marriage was illegal at the time.