On Friday mornings, we Educate Together parents are invited into class to admire our children’s work. Last week in third class it was acrostic poems about September. While his classmates had opened theirs with vignettes of squirrels gathering nuts, sunny mornings and who was sitting next to them (“Saoirse is on my table! Eli is on my table too!”), my own child had gone full Sylvia Plath on the assignment: “School returns, along with my misery”. I should have snapped a photo there and then to show well-meaning relatives asking if Ted was happy to be back at school.

Only that week, Ted had presented to my husband and me feeling “sick-y”, a Monday morning complaint involving a “throwy-up pain” in his stomach. He spent the morning prostrate on his bed sorting Pokémon cards and listening to Lottie Brooks. When the first bell had safely rung, he asked for something to eat, preferably brought to him “on a little tray”. My friend Maggie called by midafternoon as I was assembling his lunch between online meetings. “I think I need to exercise my ‘go to school’ muscle”, I mused as I arranged triangles of toast on a plate, thinking of the Kegels we were told to do post-partum. After three years of treatment for leukaemia, my nine-year-old is used to staying home from school on the flimsiest pretext. Now that he’s well, it might take some adjustment to routinely go.

Maybe we’re not alone. A recent Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) report found that more than one in five primary and post-primary pupils missed 20 or more days of school in 2023/2024, a figure described as chronic........

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