This week sees the launch of a much requested feature in FFT Aspire’s Attendance Tracker for Welsh secondary schools – the ability to analyse persistent absence by pupil group. This will allow you to compare persistent absence rates for key groups in your school such as gender, disadvantage, and special educational needs status.
To mark the occasion, we’re going to take a look at how persistent absence varied by pupil group last academic year.
As usual, we’ll be using data from Attendance Tracker, which covers around 130 secondary schools in Wales.
And we’ll be defining persistent absence as the percentage of pupils who missed a particular percentage of their possible sessions. This is different from the definition previously used by the Welsh government[1], which specified a threshold number of sessions (60) rather than a proportion. 60 sessions is equivalent to 20% of sessions for the average pupil, though is due to be reduced to 10% in a drive to identify pupils with attendance problems more quickly.
