“If the teachers ever hassle me, I just write my own sick note”: A sketch of school absenteeism in post-war Britain

By Gareth Millward

The ‘sick note’ is familiar fare in stories of school life. Pulling a sickie – by convincing a sympathetic parent to phone the school or through some other devious post-hoc signature forgery – was Ferris Beuller’s passport to adventure, after all.

But the note itself is, as Fay Weldon shows us, a disciplinary tool. It is central to what she termed in a 2000 New Statesman article ‘the ergonarchy’ – or ‘the rule of work’. We need to learn from a young age that absence will not be tolerated. ‘Turn up or blow your life’ the government warned teenagers (via the Daily Mail) in the 1990s. If you’re going to miss school (and later work), you’d better have a good reason. Pupils soon learn that you need to demonstrate to authorities that you are (or were) sick – and ‘proof’ is very easy to get hold of, regardless of the biomedical reality of the situation…

My current research examines sick notes for absence from paid work. It shows how anxieties around absenteeism, the affordability of welfare services, the British economy compared to its competitors, and the moral fibre of the nation were all emblemised by ‘the sick note’. The phrase even became a nickname for some people, including Bert ‘Sicknote’ Quigley from London’s Burning and, perhaps more famously, England international footballer Darren Anderton. I show that while these slips of paper were not scientific ‘proof’ of sickness, they remained a useful way for authorities to keep track of absences and for employees to assert their rights in the workplace. Sick notes were flawed in many ways but were adaptable to a variety of bureaucratic situations – and the alternatives were too expensive in terms of money, time, and effort.

While my research focuses primarily on adults, it was clear that anxieties in the world of work could seep into the world of school. Not that this should be surprising. School is all about preparing children for economic productivity in adulthood. The ways in which this manifested, however, were instructive, and reflected the apprehensions of the historical moment. A search of the internet archive or newspaper databases for ‘sick note’ produces a wealth of stories for the 1990s and 2000s.

In part, this reflects the popularity of the phrase at this time to describe absenteeism and unreliability – yet it also reveals the continuities and cleavages with previous decades. This turn-of-the-millennium era was one of increased focus on ‘metrics’ such as qualification attainment, attendance, standardised testing, national curricula, and league tables. In such an environment, keeping tabs on whether students were ‘really’ sick – just like employers wanted to know if their workers were ‘really’ unable to do their jobs – was vitally important. But as we’ll see, monitoring pupils was not invented in this period.

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Truancy officers have been a part of the school system since the dawn of compulsory education in the late nineteenth century. Like any obligation, however, sickness was considered a ‘legitimate’ reason to absent oneself. Authorities could not just take a person’s word that they were sick – and so would demand some sort of ‘proof’, be it through a home visit, a note from a trusted person, or a medical report. Early modern sickness clubs in Europe had used these techniques to control access to their funds, and these traditions had survived into Friendly Societies, National Health Insurance and, eventually, the post-war welfare state. Schools could perhaps be a little more relaxed than employers and insurance companies. But they didn’t always trust parents to be the judge of sickness. They certainly didn’t trust the pupils themselves.

A. T. L. Rimmer, the General Secretary of the National Association of Head teachers was concerned in 1957 that parents were telling schools their older children were sick so that teenagers could earn more money for the household or look after their younger siblings. Such behaviours had been seen in working class areas when compulsory schooling was introduced in the nineteenth century, and they did not go away. Christopher Rowlands wrote in the Daily Mail in 1977 about children who missed out on their education caring for disabled parents, able to forge or secure sick notes from adults who were willing to aid and abet them. Godfrey Holmes was still talking about such pupils in 1991.

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But not every case was seen as sympathetic – and in aggregate, truancy represented a grave problem. ‘More than a million children a year play truant from school’ cried the Independent on Sunday in 2005, with a 15 year old called Nicholas boasting ‘if the teachers ever hassle me, I just write my own sick note’. The idea of mass malingering was a stain on the nation and a sign of unruly youth, though some did question the true extent of this ‘problem’. A 1993 Observer article noted the way ‘unauthorised’ absences were collated made working class areas – where parents were more likely to only phone in a sickness rather than produce a verifiable written note – seem far worse than they actually were. The author used the opportunity to ask Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall fame, whether he ever played truant. ‘At my school not wearing your cap was a hanging offence’, the prog rocker moaned. ‘Playing truant was unthinkable.’

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Medical absence could, however, be used to protect children. As concern over the mental wellbeing of adults and children increased alongside growing awareness of mental health conditions as ‘stress’, parents and children were able to use absence bureaucracy to secure respite from bullying. Parentline advised parents to write their child a sick note to take time off school if they were being bullied. This time could then be used to tackle the root cause of the problem by seeking resolution with teachers and classmates. The Daily Mail’s Femail site offered similar counsel:

You know your own child better than anyone. If they’re feigning illness because it’s reading day and they don’t want to do it, you’ll be aware of that. But if there’s something more to it … you should consider keeping him or her at home to get to the bottom of it.

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And then, of course, the classic sick note story emerges from the newspapers. PE. It has long been a trope that a certain type of pupil hates ‘games’ lessons and will do anything to avoid them. Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band had a classic song about it from 1969.

We see wider anxieties here too, about inactivity among young people, rising rates of obesity, and the general ‘therapeutic’ effects of competitive sport. Of course, selling off school fields probably did not help matters. Still, it was amusing to see a forged-sick-note story from the 1970s where a girl’s father had written her a sick note to get out of school. They were rumbled when the headmistress saw the girl win a horse riding competition on the BBC. The parents argued this was a better use of their daughter’s time. The school had a different take…

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This has been little more than a whistle-stop tour of school sick notes in the archives. Far more work needs to be done to pull out these lived experiences and place them in the context of childhood in late-twentieth century Britain. It is no surprise that work on truancy in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries has uncovered links between ruling-class anxieties around degeneration, criminality, and economic productivity. I have no doubt fruitful links can also be drawn between truancy and British society in the postwar period in a much more methodologically satisfying way than presented here.

However, even on this superficial review we can see concerns with mental health, physical health, the need for formal qualifications, children’s domestic labour, bullying, and the relative worth of education over work experience. All of these factors were very different in 1995 than they were in 1895. Particularly when we look at the main period of ‘sick note’ press coverage (the late 1980s to early 2000s), we see numerous structural changes to education that reflected – and in turn drove – anxieties about how the state could best prepare children for adulthood.

Rather than simply being about ‘discipline’ – ensuring that children followed the rules laid out by adults – the act of missing school became folded into wider concerns about qualifications, attendance league tables, and nebulous ideas of ‘quality’ that abounded in the increased visibility and impact of ‘market liberalism’ in wider British politics at this time. Failure to attend school was not just a failure in the individual pupil, something that should be remedied to ‘save’ the child’s character and life chances. Instead, it became a failure of the school as an institution to ensure that the child went through the educative process, passed the right milestones, and came out the other side with a minimum standard of education for the modern workforce. By the 1980s, I would argue, this was more a technocratic process than a moral one. The sick note, as the slip of paper that ‘proved’ one way or the other whether procedure had been followed was part of this whole enterprise.

But this requires more study from those with a deeper appreciation of the nuances of the British education system and the changing constructions of childhood over this era. The school sick note could well be a window for an enterprising historian to uncover the deeper cultural meanings of ‘the ergonarchy’ in postwar Britain, and how it changed over time. That included children just as much as it did adult employees.

Primary source material

“Abuse of medical certificates?” Manchester Guardian, 11 June 1957.
“Advice banks – Staying off school,” in Femail, (n. d., accessed 2 March 2021, archived 18 July 2001).
“Live and kicking,” Sunday Times, 20 April 1997.
“Show-jumping Sharon comes a cropper when head sees her on TV,” Daily Mail, 23 October 1976.
“What to do when… your child is being bullied at school,” in Parentline, (n. d., accessed 2 March 2021, archived 12 July 2001).
Christopher Rowlands, “The vanishing schoolchildren,” Daily Mail, 1 June 1977.
Fay Weldon, “The rise of the ergonarchy,” New Statesman 13/601: 25-27, 17 April 2000.
Godfrey Holmes, “Taking leave of their senses,” Guardian, 3 December 1991.
Michael Durham, “Whitehall plays hookey with the facts of truancy,” Observer, 21 November 1993.
Sophie Goodchild and Tom Anderson, “More than a million children a year play truant from school,” Independent on Sunday, 9 January 2005
Tony Halpin, “Turn up or blow your life,” Daily Mail, 29 December 1998.

Secondary reading

Deborah A. Stone. The Disabled State. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).
Denis Gleeson, “School Attendance and Truancy: A Socio-Historical Account.” Sociological Review 40/3: 437–490, August 1992.
James C. Riley, “Ill health during the English mortality decline: The Friendly Societies’ experience.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61/4: 563–588, 1987.
Jill Kirby. Feeling the Strain: A Cultural History of Stress in Twentieth-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.
Nicola Sheldon, “The School Attendance Officer 1900-1939: Policeman to Welfare Worker?” History of Education 36/6: 735–746, November 2007.
Sacha Auerbach, “‘A Right Sort of Man’: Gender, Class Identity, and Social Reform in Late-Victorian Britain.” Journal of Policy History 22/1: 64–94, January 2010.
Talcott Parsons. The Social System. Glencoe: Free Press, 1951 (esp. ch. 10).

About the Author

Dr Gareth Millward is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at University of Warwick’s Centre for the History of Medicine. He leads the post doctoral research project Sick Note Britain, about medical certification and its representation in Britain since the Second World War. Previously, he was at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine, working on Alex Mold’s Placing the Public in Public Health project. His PhD, completed in 2013 at LSTHM, was on UK disability policy from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. He is the author of Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2019).

Cite this article as: Gareth Millward, “‘If the teachers ever hassle me, I just write my own sick note’: A sketch of school absenteeism in post-war Britain” in Changing Childhoods, 16 March 2021, https://changingchildhoods.com/school-absenteeism-in-post-war-britain