Where did I fail as a parent?

Two whole weeks and two days of consecutive full-time attendance and she decided to take the rest of the week off school. How do we talk a teenager into what's in their best interest? Even the side treats to keep her going don't seem to have convinced her. I have tried to remain reasonable, giving her the benefit of the doubt countless times. She says she hates school. All she enjoys doing is spending time playing on the computer, or on her phone, which we got her, with the main purpose of keeping in touch with her when needed. And she doesn't even answer the bloody thing!

When she's not home by the time I arrive from work and I try to check in with her, she doesn't even answer. She says she's embarrassed to get out because it's an android phone, not an iPhone. If I get really worried and she doesn't come back to me I end up texting her best mate, who is normally more responsive than her - guess she's got an iPhone... Don't know if it's more embarrassing to get the android phone out on that first instance or being forced to get it out because mum just had to call her best friend to check in on her.

We have given so many chances that we have now gotten to the point where there is nothing we can do. She is still under age and by law she is required to attend school. We have already told her, if she continues with this unreliable attendance, the public authorities will end up forcing her to either move with dad in Portugal, or place her with a foster family, meaning she will not live with us anymore and we will have no control over what happens with her then. She says she knows and that my persistence (she puts it nearly as in harassment terms) is only making it harder for her to get back into track.

And when she doesn't go to school I find her watching YouTube and Tik Tok videos, putting makeup on, or doing her nails... God forbid that I say something. She will say it will be unfair if I take away these little things that make her feel better. She struggles to wake up in the morning (probably because she’s on her phone till late) - which, by the way, we agreed to let her have, if she promised to go to school -. She’s never hungry when it’s dinner time, only just before bed and has now learned to pick “healthy” food to have outside normal meal times, like fruit smoothies and hot chocolate with toasts or cereal bowls, so I don’t tell her off for refusing to eat with us. But how can a parent just watch this sequence of events and stay quiet? That’s not in my nature. Can this passivity not spoil her education?

So I am changing my strategy. To start with, I have made one of the hardest moves of my life - to text her dad asking for him to speak to her, as she is not going to school -. I had to ignore the £7k+ he owes us in Child Maintenance because he never thought he really had a responsibility with the children once I decided to move out with them. All for pure spite, aiming to hurt particularly me, completely overseeing his children’s needs. But when he left for Portugal he promised he was not abandoning them, that as soon as he had a day off he would see to sort the Child Maintenance side of things with the Portuguese government he would, so that’s ok. That was in April 2021. He was just too busy trying to look after his new-found family, dedicating his love to a child that wasn’t even his. And now they broke up.

Back “in the room”. If I'm risking losing one of my children because she refuses to attend school, then I might as well do what I feel is right for her welfare, the good old school way: no school, no tech. I feel like now, that she has been talking about how she believes she could make a living by being a social media influencer or whatever - has even recently opened a TikTok account and says she has a whole strategy in place -, is the right time. She better not be thinking she can choose to be an influencer INSTEAD of following her expected year-appropriate path. I will support her if she wishes to do it as a hobby or a side gig (every little helps), but if I can have the last word, she will not have that choice.