School leaders, charities and commentators are all in agreement - falling pupil attendance is the biggest problem facing schools today. The Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel De Souza, has warned that absence is becoming ‘normalised’. Post-lockdown we’ve seen a huge rise in almost all the headline measures of absence. The rates of overall absence, persistent absence and severe absence have all increased by more than half in both primary and secondary school.
These are not one-off missed ‘snow days’ or a mischievous bunking off - persistently absent children miss 10% or more of school sessions and severely absent children miss 50% or more of their schooling. This comes with profound educational and safeguarding consequences. Persistently absent children are three times more likely to commit a criminal offence by age 17. Only 11% of severely absent children and 36% of persistently absent children achieve grades 9 to 4 in English and Maths.
Working with exclusive data from Arbor (a provider of management information systems and analytics for thousands of schools), in combination with publicly available DfE releases, we’ve been trying to identify the patterns of absences (both ‘authorised’ and ‘unauthorised’ by parents) and what’s driving them. By combining these data sets we’ve been able to make a comparison between pre and post pandemic daily attendance patterns over the last 10 years, something not possible using DfE data alone.
