We wrote recently about the relationship between absence and attainment at Key Stage 1 this year. Unsurprisingly, we found that pupils with higher absence rates tended to have lower attainment.
But pupils are missing more school now than they were pre-pandemic. Perhaps this means that the relationship between absence and attainment has changed.
To investigate this we’ll first need to establish how attainment varied with absence pre-pandemic.
The data I’ll use to do this is from the National Pupil Database. And the pupils I’ll include are those who appeared in performance tables at Key Stage 1 or Key Stage 2 in 2019, attended a mainstream state-funded school when they took those tests, and can be matched with attendance data from the 2018/19 academic year. This is 657,354 Key Stage 1 and 634,549 Key Stage 2 pupils.
