After nearly a month of publishing a daily blog it has become clear to me that this is not sustainable. Moving forward, I will continue writing daily, but that effort will go into producing longer pieces, the first of which I am publishing here. I will aim to publish my longer pieces at least once a week. Todays post was inspired by a recent conversation with my partner, and the idea that I might challenge myself to write something interesting about what on the surface appears to be quite a mundane subject. I hope that I have succeeded...
The History of the School Register
In 1862, the government linked school attendance to school funding for the first time. This was known as 'payment by results' and no doubt served as the impetus for schools to encourage high attendance levels. Then in 1870 the Elementary Education Act made school attendance compulsory between the ages of 5 and 10, to address the issue of child labour. The age of compulsory education was extended to 11 in 1893 and to 12 in 1899 and the Education Act 1918 made education compulsory for all children between 5 and 14.
The 1870 act was updated in 1876 enabling local authorities to employ attendance officers who would follow up absences, visit homes and even pursue parental prosecutions, so for the purposes of this blog I am going to refer to 1876 as the year that 'modern' registers were born.
When I started teaching in the early nineties, school attendance registers had not really changed much since the start of the modern era over 100 years previously. The only real difference was in calling out names, as we had moved from a more formal approach to a more relaxed one. By then, although the full name of a child was written on the register we were all calling out shortened versions if the child chose to go by one. From my research this change seems to have occurred in the late 1960s.
As a class teacher you were given two separate registers at the start of the year, a blue attendance one and a white one for dinners, and then expected to fill in the children's information yourself, including birth dates etc. Those of you with tendencies like me can probably already see a potential problem with this, as a child joining in mid-year would mess up your carefully alphabetised lists!
You would then be required to complete the blue attendance register with the children twice a day and also expected to complete the lunch register first thing in the morning. Interestingly, the lunch register just recorded if a child was having a packed lunch or a cooked meal. I don't think vegetarianism existed in schools in the early nineties, or if it did the expectation was that those children would have to bring in sandwiches from home. I am sure that we had never heard of children being gluten-free then either!
At the start of every morning you would pick a volunteer (one of many oxymorons in the vocabulary of a teacher), trying not to focus on the same three sensible ones, to take the registers to the office where the information would then be processed and put on whatever system they were using.
When you were taking the lunch register, you had to be very careful not to let the children see what you were writing, as you needed to write an 'F' for each child who was taking up a free school meal offer every day. Back then there was still quite a bit of stigma about free school meals, as it was before the days of free infant meals for all children, so you certainly wouldn't want to drop any of the children in it with their peers.
Notes from parents regarding absences would come to you as the class teacher, and you would store them in the blue attendance register, which meant that by the time it was full you would have assembled a collection of various bits of paper, some of which appeared to have been written by the children themselves.
That was it in terms of your responsibility as a teacher, although there were times of the year when things got more complicated. School trip permission slips and payment collection all fell within the scope of the register, which was always a bit of a headache, to put it mildly.
My recollection is that attendance was not really an issue back then, I am sure that the office looked over the registers and whoever was the 'safeguarding lead', if there was one, would be aware of vulnerable families, but it all seemed so informal compared to where we are now. Interestingly, the current definition of safeguarding was not established until 2010, when a document called 'Working Together to Safeguard Children' was first published. I am not sure if that reflects a change in society, a change in school awareness, or both.
The arrival of a new century heralded developments in the information that needed to be collected at registration, although new technologies had still not arrived. Food allergies and dietary choices were now involved, which meant the children were required to be responsible for keeping extra information in their heads too. As you can imagine, children as they are would often manipulate this information for their own gains if the meal that they were not supposed to have looked nicer than the one their parent had chosen for them and was recorded in the register!
Those of you reading this who look back with fondness at the pranks you played on the teacher who was taking the register when you were young will be glad to know that these are still occurring in 2024. The old chestnuts, such as children answering each others names for supply teachers, are still relatively common, and twins still have fun with confusing the adults, particularly if the person taking the register is not the normal class teacher. Another one that some children particularly enjoy is answering their names in a very quiet voice, too quiet for aging ears to hear, and then protesting when you tell them off for not answering when their name was called. School register scenarios remain popular fodder for comedians too, although I would not recommend checking out Rowan Atkinson's once legendary 'taking the register' sketch unless you want to see how quickly comedy dates and ceases to become funny. On that subject, I would recommend Key and Peele's sketch titled 'substitute teacher', which is much more contemporary and very funny, but I expect that will go the same way as Atkinson's sketch in the coming years.
By the time I left the classroom, the process of taking the register had become almost completely streamlined into a time-efficient process, with office staff taking on lots of responsibility, which sounds great, but the designers of the system we used had not reckoned with my teachers, who managed to add in some very frustrating quirks to 'personalise' it for our school. As a head with some teaching commitment but no class of my own, I had to deal with these quirks on a regular basis.
The first of these was giving the children to answer the register in a different language, I think as part of some misguided attempt to use the time to tick off some parts of the languages curriculum. There were two issues with this, the first being the temptation for the children to 'do the voice' of however they chose to answer the register, and the second being what you might describe as 'slippage'. Whilst most children can parrot words back to you like 'konichiwa', it is amazing what those words turn into after a couple of weeks!
The second problem was with the classes that the teacher had decided to give ownership of the register to. Now, in most cases I am all for children being given ownership and responsibility for things, but not in terms of the register. The way it worked in these classes was that the first person on the register said good morning to the second one, the second one to the third one, and so on. Problems came if a child was away, as the more able children would then just skip to the next name in the register, but with the less able or less confident the register would just grind to a halt. Either way, it was impossible to keep up with, as you still had to record absences etc on the computer.
Believe it or not, my teachers were not the only ones to add 'fun' to the register. There are many websites titled things like 'creative ideas for taking attendance' and 'taking attendance to the next level: 90 engaging roll call questions'. I am as keen as anyone to make learning fun, but some people have too much time on their hands.
What would usually happen if I was teaching a class was a grumpy retort from me something along the lines of 'well today we are doing the register the old fashioned way!' I felt that it was important in terms of positive relationships to say good morning to each child in turn, and to have them say good morning back to me, and besides, I enjoyed it. I guess I could have instructed all teachers to do this, but I was always a 'pick your battles' kind of guy!
Self-registration has become a thing in primary schools too. Children finding their name or their face and sticking it up on a registration board sounds lovely in principle, doesn't it? The problem is that it just adds another layer of protocol into the whole thing and doesn't make it any easier for the teacher as they still have to check that the children have all 'done' their register before transferring the data to whatever MIS (Management Information System) the school uses. I am not sure how registration works in primary classes in private schools but I guess that the children click something on their Apple Watches that sends the information to the teacher's Mac Book Pro?
So what's going to be the next step for classroom registers? Its obviously going to involve biometrics, as we all now have to have a policy about biometric data. Some institutions have already started to explore facial recognition software with secondary aged pupils, but fallen foul of data protection and been reprimanded by the Information Commissioners' Office (ICO). As you might expect, Microsoft have put their solution forward, one which involves students 'self registering' with QR codes and has even got built in 'gamification' (don't you hate that word?) Self-registering for secondary school pupils, I am sure that won't get abused!
I think it is going to be some time before anything like this comes into primary schools, and when it does you can guarantee that local authorities and MATs will drastically underestimate the cost and disruption of setting up whatever system we end up using. I am reminded of an occasion during my own schooling when our sixth form installed all the points and wiring needed for us to have our own cards to scan in and out of lessons. The teachers were all very proud of this, and actually some of the geekiest of us students were too. It never worked, even once.
Just a final thought. In the last few years attendance has become one of, if not the most talked about issues in schools. We now have 'attendance champions' and documents released almost daily to help us with improving attendance, it is one of the things Ofsted comments on most, and schools are encouraged to fine parents more than they actually do. Before all this, in 1981, national attendance for primary schools was 93.8%. In 2023 attendance levels were 93.2%, so there has been a drop of 0.6% over that time. Obviously there are some hugely significant cases, but given the national picture being pretty much what it was 40 years ago, I am left wondering, has it all been worth it?
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