Remote Education/Homeschooling During the COVID-19 Pandemic, School Attendance Problems, and School Return–Teachers’ Experiences and Reflections

Abstract

According to Norway’s Educational Act (§2-1), all children and youths from age 6 to 16 have a right and an obligation to attend free and inclusive education, and most of them attend public schools. Attending school is important for students’ social and academic development and learning; however, some children do not attend school caused by a myriad of possible reasons. Interventions for students with school attendance problems (SAPs) must be individually adopted for each student based on a careful assessment of the difficulties and strengths of individuals and in the student’s environment. Homeschooling might be one intervention for students with SAPs; however, researchers and stakeholders do not agree that this is an optimal intervention. Schools that were closed from the middle of March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to investigate remote education more closely. An explorative study was conducted that analyzed 248 teachers’ in-depth perspectives on how to use and integrate experiences from the period of remote education for students with SAPs when schools reopen. Moreover, teachers’ perspectives on whether school return would be harder or easier for SAP students following remote education were investigated. The teachers’ experiences might be useful when planning school return for students who have been absent for prolonged periods.

Home‐schooling in the Republic of Ireland

“…There is, however, little research or understanding of what frequency or form home‐schooling monitoring should take. In Norway, for example, the Education Act specifies that the quality of home education should be the same as that of public education and should be evaluated by local municipalities (Havik & Magne Ingul, 2022). In France, inspections are carried out once a year by the academy inspector, who checks that the child is receiving a common core of knowledge, skills and culture (Service‐Public‐FR, 2022).…”

School refusal: a case‐based exploration of school avoidance

“…While some families and school teams may initially see benefits of the flexibility of alternative forms of school learning such as virtual schooling or homeschooling, recommendations that the child transition to virtual schooling and homeschooling as options to address school avoidance can also make school avoidance more challenging (Havik & Ingul, 2022).…”

Unlearning school attendance and its problems: Moving from historical categories to postmodern dimensions

“…The data often differ across informant sources, ignore the many multifaceted aspects of school non-attendance, and are easily subject to corruption from caregivers and schools (Keppens et al, 2019;Gentle-Genitty et al, 2020). Overreliance on presence/absence from school also neglects the fact that many students worldwide now receive education in hybrid, homebased, and virtual formats where attendance is difficult to track (e.g., Havik and Ingul, 2022). In addition, presence/absence from school has been used historically by many educational and other entities for punitive purposes, particularly for minoritized students, by excluding from school those with other challenges (e.g., behavioral, academic; Mireles-Rios et al, 2020), by applying legal and other sanctions for absenteeism disproportionately to vulnerable populations (Conry and Richards, 2018), and by penalizing students who are late to school or who miss school for reasons outside of their control (Chang, 2018).…”