The Commons Education Select Committee met yesterday. One of their current inquiries focuses on tackling persistent absence. At the meeting, Dame Rachel De Souza, England’s children’s commissioner, spoke of her concerns about children missing lots of school on Fridays. The data she analysed was from Autumn 2021, so we thought we’d share an updated picture, using Autumn 2022 data from our 10,000 Attendance Tracker schools.
We’ve seen that the situation Dame Rachel described for Autumn 2021, where pupils missed more school on Fridays than other days, continued in Autumn 2022. And we’ve seen that this appears to be more widespread among severe absentees than the general population, and among pupils who are disadvantaged and/or have an identified SEN.
She went on to suggest that the reason for pupils missing more school on Fridays than other days was that their parents were more likely to be at home on Fridays. As we’re limited to what’s recorded in the register, we can’t test this.
She also suggested that this pattern wasn’t there before the pandemic. Unfortunately, we can’t test this either because we only started collecting daily attendance data after the pandemic started.
