This week marks the start of “back to school” season. Inspired by a piece of work released by the Children’s Commissioner for England last year, we thought it would be a good opportunity to look at attendance patterns at the start of last academic year, and the impact these had on attendance across the rest of the year.
As always, the data we’ll use is from our 10,000 Attendance Tracker schools.
Before we begin, we first need to establish when “the first week of school” actually was. To do this we look at the marks schools entered at the beginning of September. Specifically, we look for the first mark which indicates that a pupil was expected to attend.
In our sample of schools, around 15% expected at least some of their pupils to attend for the first time in the week ending 2nd September 2022. A further 82% expected them to attend for the first time in the week ending 9th September 2022.
It’s common for schools to operate some kind of phased return in September. For example, secondary schools may choose to open only to Year 7s for a day or two to allow them to acclimatise, before opening the school fully to all year groups. Some schools also have a staggered start for Reception pupils, in which they attend part-time at first.
