Stakeholder perspectives on primary school pupils and sickness absence - exploring opportunities and challenges

Abstract

School absenteeism and its underlying causes can have negative effects on the cognitive, psychosocial and health development of a child. Research in primary education shows high rates of sickness absence. Many stakeholders are involved in addressing school absenteeism, including primary school professionals, child and youth healthcare physicians, school attendance officers and parents. This study explores these stakeholders’ perspectives, their approaches and what they envisage to be necessary in order to improve. It also aims to unveil opportunities and challenges in addressing sickness absence among primary school pupils. Qualitative research was performed with six semi-structured focus group interviews and involving 27 participants from the West-Brabant and Amsterdam regions of the Netherlands. Thematic analysis was used. The overarching theme was aiming for the child’s wellbeing. Each focus group interview started with low awareness of sickness absence as a threat to this wellbeing, but awareness grew during the interviews. The participating stakeholders regarded problematic sickness absence as complex due to a wide variety of causes, and felt that each other’s expertise was necessary to reduce sickness absence. Schools registered absence, but only occasionally used planned steps; they based the identification of problematic sickness on gut feeling rather than any agreed-upon criteria. To be able to systematically address sickness absence and thus improve the wellbeing of children, stakeholders felt the need for a clearly structured approach, including monitoring of sickness absence of all pupils, identifying problematic absence and promoting collaboration with other stakeholders. An approach should allow for tailoring solutions to the individual child.

A Systematic Scoping Review on Research Focusing on Professionals’ Attitudes toward School Attendance Problems

“…Not covered. 1 Categorized under SAPs as the term is conceptualized as both problematic or nonproblematic authorized absence associated with physical, social, psychological, and lifestyle problems [58]. 2 Categorized under SAPs as the term is broadly conceptualized and used as a general term referring to unauthorized absenteeism [30,33,[36][37][38]47,51,61,62,64,68,70,72,73].…”

How to deal with sickness absence among primary school pupils? Adaptation of the “Medical Advice for Sick-reported Students” intervention

“…Participating professionals worked for or with primary schools in either Amsterdam or West-Brabant region of the Netherlands and the parents had children in primary schools in West-Brabant. A comprehensive description of the methods of the interview study can be found in a separate article, which also includes results (11).…”

“…Although it is authorized, frequent and/or longer periods of sickness absence should be addressed by schools. Such extensive sickness absence might be an indication of underlying problems and will have negative consequences for intellectual development and socio-emotional functioning (11,12). Thus, we start with the assumption that extensive sickness absence requires appropriate action by schools to improve pupils health in its broad sense.…”

The Recording, Reporting, and Use of School Attendance Data by School Personnel in The Netherlands: Toe the Line or Take a New Path?

“…It is thus difficult to identify exact rates of absence due to illness on a national or even municipal level. Research suggests that absences due to illness account for a large proportion of total school absenteeism in primary education (Pijl et al, 2021;Roelofs et al, 2021). Nevertheless, there is sometimes less awareness of the impact of (authorised) illness-related absence on young people's well-being (Pijl et al, 2021).…”

“…As a result, school personnel may respond to authorised absenteeism in a way which is 'too little, too late'. To be sure, authorised absence such as absenteeism due to illness accounts for a substantial share of total absenteeism among young people (Pijl et al, 2021;Roelofs et al, 2021). Moreover, authorised and unauthorised absenteeism both have the potential to affect a young person's development (Havik et al, 2015).…”