School attendance rates since the pandemic are being affected by more parents working from home, the head of Ofsted has declared.

Martyn Oliver, the chief inspector of England’s schools told the Sunday Times parents not going out to work was causing a shift in children’s attitudes while parents at home also don’t have the same desire to get their offspring into school.

I don’t know one parent - fortunate enough to work from home - who relishes having children wandering about indoors while they’re trying to get things done, it’s almost impossible as we all discovered during lockdown.

That’s not to mention that most professional working parents - with an average 13 weeks of school holidays to cover-off with four or five weeks annual leave each - have more than enough weeks when their children are under their feet that they probably don’t wish to add to it.

So let’s move onto his other point and children not seeing a parent leave for work…

Rewind 30 or 40 years and the majority of children would have had one near permanent stay-at-home parent - most likely mum.

According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies fewer than half of mothers of working age were in paid work in 1975 - compared to 72% in 2015 - while in 1985 just 29% of women worked full time.

Therefore many hundreds of thousands of children would have left for school and come back to a parent who had been close to home all day, me included, and never did it lead anyone to argue they didn’t have to go to school.

So unless Mr Oliver has concrete research that correlates school absences with parents sat at the kitchen table, over and above his ‘feeling’ on the matter, is he not perhaps clutching at straws?

Not to mention brushing under the carpet the very real and pressing issues as to why almost a quarter of secondary school children, and a seventh of primary pupils, now regularly miss school.

Covid changed society’s attitudes and derailed so many children’s education.

While teacher recruitment and retention issues, a lack of SEN provision and a tsunami of mental health problems among youngsters that can’t be met by a crippled NHS, have all compounded the issues.

Working while raising a family is tough and it’s disappointing to see the chief inspector of schools attack parents in this way.

Rather than demonise home working could he not back working families and hail the benefits to households such flexibility can bring - particularly at a time where increasing numbers of companies look to bring staff back to offices.

It’s very often mothers who seek flexibility in an attempt to be able to maintain a career around motherhood and suggesting there are detrimental consequences will do nothing to prevent these women being pushed further out of the workplace, contributing to an ever widening gender pay gap.

For starters being able to cut down the one-hour commute in each direction a few times a week perhaps enables parents to be more present of an evening, to help with homework or revision, serve a home-cooked meal or take their kids to sports clubs or an out-of-school activity.

The reasons for school absences are complicated, multi-faceted and I’m sure in some cases parents will come into it.

But does where they open their laptop play a part? I doubt it.