The start of 2024 has seen a renewed focus on persistent absenteeism from school, with the Secretary of State for Education announcing a major national drive to improve school attendance, and the Shadow Secretary of State for Education laying out Labour’s plans to ‘rebuild the broken relationship between schools, families and the Government’. Yet this is not a new problem: the issue of persistent absenteeism has been looming since schools returned to ‘normal’ after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Everyone agrees that the rise in pupil absence since the pandemic is of significant concern. But the causes and what we should do about this are much less clear.
In particular, it is striking how challenging it is to get a clear picture of parents’ perceptions of the problem. Research by Public First highlights that many parents are unconvinced by the “every day matters” approach to absence, yet 88% endorse this message in YouGov’s polling for the Centre for Social Justice. While this does leave 8% disagreeing with the statement (and a further 4% not expressing a view either way), which is still a large number of parents, it seems implausible that this alone could explain the majority of the increase in absence rates.
The reality of the situation is that the substantial rise is likely due to a ‘perfect storm’ of combining factors exacerbated by the aftermath of the pandemic. It will take a multifaceted response over several years to turn the situation around. Below, we unpick some of the patterns in absence, highlighting parental attitudes but also cost of living, special educational needs, and mental health as some of the headline factors in this ‘perfect storm’. The fact that these latter factors are predictive of persistent absenteeism when comparing similar pupils (in terms of background and prior attainment) highlights their importance, too, to determining effective policy responses.
