Earlier this month we looked at how absence rates in September compared with last September. We saw that they had increased slightly at secondary, and stayed roughly the same at primary. In this post, we’ll look at how the rest of the half-term panned out.
As usual, we’ll be using data from the 2,700 secondary and 7,200 primary schools that use FFT’s Attendance Tracker. We’ll be restricting the analysis to English schools.
Let’s start by plotting the average absence rates of pupils in each week of the term so far. We’ll do this separately for primary and secondary.
We see the familiar pattern of absence increasing as term goes on, peaking in the weeks before the half-term break.
We also see that absence among primary pupils in October this year was generally lower than last year, while for secondary pupils it tended to be a few percentage points higher.
