Absence and attainment in primary schools in 2023

This follows on from a previous post in which we produced similar analysis using the full national dataset for 2018/19 collected by the Department for Education.

As always when we examine this relationship, we stress that attendance and attainment are associated but the relationship is not necessarily causal. Absence may be a contributory factor to low attainment but they also share some underlying root causes.

We use attainment data collected from schools which participated in FFT’s Early Results Services this year.