SPECIAL REPORT: Rise of the ‘ghost kids’ who by no means go to highschool

For some 10 million pupils it is back-to-school month. But for a growing minority the lazy days of the summer holidays are set to continue.

In the glass-fronted wellbeing centre at an all-girls state secondary school in a wealthy Midlands suburb, no expense has been spared to create a relaxed, calming ­atmosphere. The walls are painted in mood-enhancing shades.

Pupils lounge on sofas with plush cushions, snacks and drinks on hand. Nothing as exhausting as school work is going on. The teenagers are listening to music on their headphones or scrolling through mobile phones, chatting and laughing.

They say they are suffering mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.

‘A girl has only to mention she’s feeling a little anxious and staff send them to the ­wellbeing centre,’ Joanna, a middle-aged teacher at the school, explains. ‘I am ­horrified at the speed with which they pull pupils out of lessons.’

At lunchtime, the staff take trays of food from the canteen to them ‘so they don’t even engage with ­queuing up and getting lunch’.

Some parents express concern that their daughters are doing nothing all day. But ­centre staff – not qualified teachers and often only a few years older than the pupils – warn any ­pressure might cause the child to stop eating or self-harm, so they back off.

For Joanna, the ‘softly, softly’ approach is why the number of troubled girls is ballooning at the school.

Chloe, one of Joanna’s star pupils, is a case in point. Bright and full of potential, she began to skip lessons in the year before her GCSEs and soon found her way to the centre. Chloe explained to Joanna with a chuckle: ‘I just say I am anxious and I can come here,’ to which Joanna replied: ‘Chloe, be smart. This is not working towards your future.’

Joanna went to the centre to plead with the young staff there: ‘I know there’s only a small window of time when you can rescue the ­situation and get them back into school.’

But they rolled their eyes, accusing her of being ‘abusive’, she says.

‘It happened so fast. In January it was all a bit of a laugh for Chloe. By June she could not leave home,’ says Joanna. ‘What had started as a joke had become a reality as she missed more and more school. The adults around her connived with her. It was almost as if they talked her anxiety into existence. No one said pack your bag and get into school.’

Joanna sighs: ‘That is a really ­talented, lovely girl lost.’

Tess Bailey-Sayer, child and adolescent analytic psychotherapist, explains: ‘When young children are sick, the illness spikes quickly. It is not dissimilar with mental health. When they drop out of school, their mental wellbeing deteriorates fast.

‘They lose touch with their friends and confidence in their educational ability. If the adults around them do not get them back into school, their anxiety and depression take hold.’

Unfortunately, some schools’ approach is encouraging this. The Office for Health Improvement & Disparities states girls are twice as likely to say they are unhappy with their mental health as boys.

A report by The Children’s Society charity, finds that the decline in happiness among 15-year-old girls in the seven years to 2022 is one of the steepest in Europe.

Many schools have some sort of wellbeing centre. But they vary. Joanna’s school decided to put ­significant resources into theirs. Yet at a state school in east London, its centre is just one small, basic room, though pupils still lie around on bean bags, scrolling on their phones.

A teaching assistant says, ‘It used to be called the exclusion centre. It may have changed name but it’s still the same faces. Only now they do no work.’

The Centre For Social Justice (CSJ) think tank was the first to raise the issue of children absent from school, known as ‘ghost children’. Figures, for autumn 2023 show 142,487 missed 50 per cent or more school time – more than double pre-pandemic levels, and are the highest for any autumn term.

One in five children, nearly 1.5 ­million, are still missing the equivalent of an afternoon a week. So what is going on?

Chloe and many of her peers are victims of lockdown. The repercussions have been widespread, unforeseen and disastrous.

Lockdown has affected children at all ages from babies with anxious new mothers stripped of health visitors, GPs, friends or family, to teenagers confined to their rooms with just the malign influence of social media for company and nothing but ‘dead time’ stretching ahead.

As a 13-year-old told me: ‘I was scared I’d lost myself for ever and become a different version of myself.’

Now, children and teens affected by lockdown are growing up.

‘Disengagement from school is baked in,’ says Iain MacRitchie, founder of MCR Pathways, a ­nationwide mentoring programme. Instead of punishing absent pupils, schools hope to encourage their return by catering to their wishes.

‘The young people are getting their timetable reduced with the most challenging subjects filtered out,’ he says.

One boy explained to me his school told him he need only come in for half a day and that time would not have a maths or an English ­lesson. ‘My mum went mental when she found out,’ the boy said.

Absent pupils are much more likely to end up in the ‘NEET’ cohort – not engaged in education, ­employment or training. Centre for Social Justice analysis revealed that persistently absent pupils are about three times more likely than their peers to commit a crime within two years of leaving school.

Children on free school meals are three times more likely to be severely absent than more affluent classmates, but it is by no means a problem for disadvantaged pupils alone, as Chloe’s experience shows. Nor can lockdown be held solely responsible for the continuing crisis of mental health in young people.

It only accelerated an existing trend – what Jonathan Haidt, the US social psychologist described in his book, The Anxious Generation, as the transition from a play-based to a phone-based childhood.

He says: ‘The mass migration of childhood into the virtual world has disrupted social and neurological development’ – which has caused ‘social anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction’.

The impact of the pandemic is being compounded by our failure to bring people back into school. Ben, 13, tells what happened to his best friend Will, the son of well-meaning, ­middle-class parents. Over lockdown, Will, like many young people, retreated into the virtual world.

‘At night we’d text till late, all this deep, personal stuff. But when he finally came into school, he could barely say a word to me.

‘He’s meant to be my best friend but he can only communicate online where he’s got all these friends he’s never met.’

Will finally dropped out of school, citing anxiety and depression. His parents took him to Wales for a fresh start. Ben asks: ‘Why didn’t his parents make him go back to school?’

He was horrified by the change in his friend. ‘He’s like this ghost. I said to my dad: ‘You would have pinned me down and forced my ­uniform on, wouldn’t you?’

Will’s parents urge him to take up activities. ‘But online is where he’s got his friends and interests. He’s not in the real world now.’

The onslaught of lockdown and social media combined with the misguided indulgence of many schools explains why the expected recovery in school attendance is not happening. It is getting worse.

The repercussions will not just hit school children but society as a whole as these young people move on to the next stage of life.

Catherine, a 17-year-old accountancy student, found this out for herself. Of the 28 who began her sixth-form course last September, only she remains. Her peers ‘have either been kicked off because they weren’t keeping up with the tests or dropped out’.

The college has closed the course down and Catherine ­studies in the next town. She says: ‘It was hard seeing my friends flaking out and the year group get smaller and smaller.’

Many cited their mental health as a reason for quitting, ­something that Catherine says her Croatian father, who started his own ­building business, would never have countenanced.

It’s an upbringing she’s thankful for, as she sees her old ­classmates at their ‘nice homes’, but ‘most of them have no lives and no future’.

The dropout rate among young people comes with a cost not just to themselves but also society. More than 730,000 under-18s are now the subject of Disability ­Living Allowance (DLA) – a tax-free benefit for parents who need help caring for their children.

This is up a startling 40 per cent since November 2019, according to Department for Work and Pensions figures. The number of parents claiming DLA is expected to hit 948,000 by 2028-29 – more than double pre-pandemic levels and equal to about one in 14 children.

Andy King, a former official at the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Government’s tax and spending watchdog, said: ‘Many children receiving disability benefits continue to do so as young adults, and relatively few of those will be in work… [storing up] challenges ahead for both the economy and the public finances.’

Now thousands of ­students go straight from university on to long-term sickness due to poor mental health, says an NHS Confederation and Boston Consulting Group report out last week.

Worklessness hit a 13-year high in the three months to June, with 9.5 million adults now neither in work nor looking for a job.

The cost of this inactivity is eye watering. Sickness benefits will surge to £64billion by the end of this parliament, up £30billion from before the pandemic.

The surge is unique to the UK. In Britain one in every 15 people of working age is now off owing to long-term illness, a rate 69 per cent higher than Germany.

Anne, a vet running an animal sanctuary with a link to a nearby secondary school, has witnessed the fallout first-hand. Since the pandemic, she has seen more pupils – mainly girls – spend time in her sanctuary ostensibly for therapeutic reasons.

Anne brands them ‘pampered’. She said the parents, some quite wealthy, would ‘pull up in their expensive cars. I don’t know if the mothers work or not but they seem to be able to tend full-time to their girls’ mental health needs’. The school had tried everything to re-engage their pupils, even ­paying for individual tutors.

One girl, Emily, who wanted to be a vet, insisted she was taught in Anne’s small office. ‘She found the school building too traumatising,’ says Anne. Safe-guarding meant a team of two had to be with the girl. As Anne says: ‘You can imagine the cost.’

‘Emily was very smart and very sad. But the tutor and I could never identify why Emily was traumatised. The school couldn’t tell us. Neither could Emily!’

Now 17, this bright girl has not a single qualification.

Anne says: ‘I asked her how she thought she could afford her ­parents’ lifestyle when she was older. What would she live on? She might just about get a job in the local B&Q and that’s it. She looked quite surprised.’

It is not just disadvantaged youngsters who are dropping out but also those who could have become professionals, depriving society of accountants, vets and more. As one teacher put it: ‘Don’t expect Generation Z to pay your pensions.’