Absence has been high since the start of the pandemic. And there doesn’t seem to be much in the latest data to suggest a return to pre-pandemic norms any time soon.
Naturally, this raises concerns about the possible impact of high absence rates on outcomes. So today we’ll look at the relationship between absence and Progress 8 scores in 2022.
The data I’ll use is from the National Pupil Database, and covers pupils who completed Key Stage 4 in 2022, linked to absence data from 2020/21 and 2021/22.
The absence data I have doesn’t contain the number of sessions coded as “X” in registers, used for pupils who were unable to attend because of COVID (apart from those who tested positive themselves – they tended to be marked as ill). As a result, the figures here will ignore school closures due to the national lockdown of 2021, “bubbles” bursting en-masse in Autumn 2020 and Summer 2021, and any other days missed due to mandatory isolation.
