We’ve written lots about high levels of absence since the start of the pandemic. In Autumn Term this year, secondary pupils missed an average of 8.8% of sessions – around three percentage points higher than pre-pandemic.
Among disadvantaged pupils, absence rates were even higher, at 14.0%. But how did this vary in schools with different levels of disadvantage? Did disadvantaged pupils in schools with a high percentage of disadvantaged pupils tend to have higher or lower rates of absence? That’s what we look at in this article.
As usual, we’ll be using data from our FFT Attendance Tracker schools. We limit our sample to state-funded mainstream secondaries – around 2,500 schools in total. And we’ll look at data across the whole of the 22/23 academic year[1].
To measure school-level disadvantage, we divide schools into ten equal sized groups, or “deciles” according to the proportion of their pupils who were eligible for free school meals in the past six years (FSM6).
