By Eleanor Harding Education Editor For The Daily Mail
Published: 22:00 BST, 5 May 2019 | Updated: 00:00 BST, 6 May 2019
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Children are using doctors' notes to excuse them from French, German and Spanish because language lessons apparently damage their mental health.
Delegates at the National Association of Head Teachers annual conference were told yesterday pupils are being 'wholesale' signed off because the subjects are making them 'unwell'.
Marijke Miles, a member of the union's executive, said schools reporting the problem were 'high achieving' in leafy, expensive catchment areas.
Pupils are using doctors' notes to excuse them from language lessons because they damage their mental health
Children were being made 'anxious' by compulsory languages and were being signed off them 'in order not to become completely out of school', she added.
Rob Campbell, the chief executive of the Morris Education Trust in Cambridgeshire, said the problem was 'an increasingly common occurrence', although doctors' letters often mention a range of stresses, not just languages, making the child unwell.
His trust, which runs two secondary schools, encourages languages but finds many pupils view this as their weakest area.
Head teachers have voted for potential strikes over funding.
The National Association of Head Teachers could ballot members on walkouts over the next two years.
The union passed a motion at its conference in Telford yesterday to ‘explore options ... up to and including industrial action’ to address the ‘funding crisis’ in schools.
The Department for Education said: ‘The core schools and high needs budget is rising to a record £43.5 billion by 2019-20.’
'You would have kids who are requesting to drop subjects, and it's often subjects that they've struggled with the most,' he said. 'They don't want to face the prospect of doing badly.'
He added that in some cases children might try to get out of a
