I stopped taking student attendance personally and haven’t looked back

Around February, I realised that something in my classroom’s energy had shifted. Somewhere along the way, without actively deciding to do so, I had stopped taking student attendance numbers personally.

Like many UK academics, I had been demoralised by low attendance. When, in a newspaper article, one lecturer referenced 30 per cent attendance as a “good day”, I could relate.

I began teaching in the UK in autumn 2021, just as the country emerged from lockdowns, and was shocked to find fewer than 10 students regularly attending my ostensibly 25-person seminars. On one December day, amid a perfect storm of nationwide train strikes and end-of-term stress, I turned up to lecture to an empty room.

I have watched colleagues facing similar circumstances react consistently with despair. Seeing how much work they put into planning their lessons, I can understand this. But despair is not sustainable. Now, I’ve started to concentrate on the joy I get from working with the students who do show up, rather than feeling personally slighted by those who don’t.

I’ve relaxed more. I approach teaching sessions with adaptability in mind. I try to set aside my fear of negative comments and ask students for more regular feedback on materials and activities. I still care when students disappear, and my department has mechanisms for checking in with them, but I don’t start each class from a place of frustration.

I’ve also stopped constantly catastrophising about whether low attendance is something I have caused. Because, realistically, it isn’t. Some critics, academics included, respond to low attendance by urging teachers to adopt more engaging activities or otherwise make the prospect of showing up more exciting. This is well-intentioned advice, and it is not entirely wrong. It is another way of saying “be a good teacher”, something I believe most of us strive for, under ideal circumstances. But circumstances are far from ideal, both for teachers and students.

When we take attendance personally and propose solutions that are localised to the individual person – “You, personally, need to be a better student or teacher” – we miss that realisation. We miss the structural factors that matter far more for attendance than any single choice any single teacher or student might make.

I refer not only to the cost-of-living crisis and rising student rents but to the profound emotional trauma so many of us carry from the pandemic, which we still refuse to process as a society. Research has found that many individuals who experienced higher levels of depression during lockdown continued to suffer symptoms once restrictions eased. Headteachers report mental health as the biggest driver of school absences, and mental health issues don’t disappear once students reach university. On my campus, mental health disorders now represent the majority of disabilities accommodated in student support plans.

Meanwhile, university counselling services have been stretched thin since well before the pandemic. Counsellors facing their own traumas, pandemic-related or otherwise, are asked to serve ever-increasing numbers of students and staff with little possibility of pausing to catch their breath. So, too, are the academic staff providing pastoral support – who, in practice, include everyone with teaching or supervisory responsibilities. With increased caregiving responsibilities, new or worsened long-term health conditions, and the impacts of larger political crises in the UK and abroad, university staff have more in common with their struggling students than they are encouraged to acknowledge.

Instead of providing a foundation for student-staff solidarity in the face of a callous and uncaring system, shaming students for missing class presents them as the problem. Likewise, it makes no sense to conclude at the individual level that systemic low attendance is the fault of any single teacher, but depression and anxiety feed on such individualised narratives. The well-intentioned advice of “be more engaging!”, cast through the prism of mental illness, sounds like “You are failing at your job.” So individualised narratives not only misdiagnose the problem but can also make it worse.

Taking attendance personally is a very human reaction. But I have come to see it as a deeply unhelpful and inaccurate one. Expecting students to deem my class the most important way to spend their time when they are struggling feels exceptionally silly. I believe strongly that the classroom can be a site of radical, even joyful potential, building confidence and community. Yet it may not be all these things all the time for all people, and it can be none of them if we present it as a space that shames students for being human.

Here’s what happened when I stopped taking attendance personally. A student emailed me at the end of term to tell me she felt comfortable coming to class even while managing anxiety. “I could always attend seminars judgement-free,” she said. “I never felt as though I shouldn’t have been in the room.” I also gave the first above-80 marks I have ever given in any module; some students’ work was so bold and creative that there was simply no other choice.

Our final seminar was a free-flowing conversation built on mutual trust and respect, in which students freely expressed frustrations and asked how they could work to bring about change on campus. Instead of making the classroom about me or about them, it had become about us.

Anna Meier is assistant professor of politics and international relations at the University of Nottingham.