Michael Gove: deduct benefits for parents whose children skip school

Reported in The Times, not sure if there’s a paywall so here’s the gist. What do you think? My own feeling is that they need to look harder about why this is happening. It’s not like my own childhood, when my mother took me to school and I went home for my midday meal then she took me back to school. Most parents now have no choice but to work and I’m not sure that’s a good thing in all cases.

Parents could lose their child benefit payments if they allow their children to play truant, under plans being pushed by Michael Gove.

Michael Gove: deduct benefits for parents whose children skip school
February 28 2023, The Times
Parents could lose their child benefit payments if they allow their children to play truant, under plans being pushed by Michael Gove.
The levelling up secretary wants the penalties to be included in an action plan on reducing antisocial behaviour that he is preparing for Rishi Sunak.
Gove said it was time to “think radically about restoring an ethic of responsibility” and argued that financial penalties would give parents an incentive to stop their children missing school and committing low-level crime.
Last month, when Sunak put Gove in charge of the plan, he said antisocial behaviour should not be seen as “inevitable or a minor crime” but as a gateway to more serious offences.
Gove said that cutting truanting would be central to stopping teenagers drifting into offences such as vandalism or graffiti, and urged police to stop “virtue signalling” and clamp down on such offences.
“We need to — particularly after Covid — get back to an absolute rigorous focus on school attendance on supporting children to be in school. It is often the case that it’s truanting or persistent absenteeism that leads to involvement in antisocial behaviour,” he told an event on the future of Conservatism organised by the Onward think tank. “One of the ideas that we floated in the coalition, which the Liberal Democrats rejected, was the idea that if children were persistently absent, that child benefit should be stopped. I think what we do need to do is to think radically about restoring an ethic of responsibility.”
Gove sought to introduce the plan while education secretary but was blocked by Nick Clegg and later pushed David Cameron to put it in the Conservative manifesto for the 2015 election. But today he said that “linking parental responsibility for attendance and good behaviour to the state” was an idea that “needs to be reconsidered again”.

It is understood that Gove is keen for the policy to be included in an action plan to be published in the next month. However, the idea has yet to be discussed with other ministers, including the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, or the work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride.

Under the coalition’s plans, parents would have faced penalties of £60 for persistent truanting, which, if not paid, would double to £120. They would have been collected through child benefit to ensure they were not ignored.
Unauthorised absences from school have been drifting up in the past two years, with an estimated 180,000 pupils skipping school every day.

Gove insisted that minor offences should not be dismissed, saying: “Low-level crime can have a high impact on the lives of many”, and that confidence in politics suffered when it was not addressed.

He said this was also true of the “confidence that investors have in communities where low-level crime and antisocial behaviour is not dealt with. And we also know that there have been incentives for some in the world of policing to virtue signal, rather than to pursue vice and that needs to change.”

In his speech, Gove also hit out at social progressives whom he refused to describe as “woke”, arguing: “I dislike the use of the word both because it can at times seem to trivialise and render as simply eccentric, and amusing what is actually an increasingly powerful and destructive force in our society. And also because I believe in being awake to genuine injustice is a distinctive part of the conservative tradition.”
Insisting “I want to bring peace to our culture wars”, Gove argued that it was “the radical social change activists who want to identify, create and magnify divisions”.

Arguing that progressives wanted to present Britain as a “pirate society” to legitimise institutions and values, he insisted: “We need to be clear that enlightenment values have to be defended. We need to be clear about objective scientific truth in human biology: emotion can’t change our chromosomes; any examination also of the historical record should be based on a balanced assessment of the evidence.”

Munira Wilson, the Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman, said: “If Michael Gove thinks that the solution to encourage children back to school is to impoverish them, then he is living in a different century.”