Today, alongside Centre for Mental Health we published a report exploring the drivers of school absence and potential solutions to tackle the attendance crisis. We are grateful to Coalition members Square Peg for using their expertise to support this report.
Currently, one in five children are persistently absent from school, which means they are missing 10% or more of school time and in 2022-23, 150,000 children were severely absent. This means that they were missing over 50% of possible sessions.
We know that the school attendance debate has been a large part of the education space since the pandemic, but it is more nuanced than often perceived. Mental health has a huge impact on children and young people, with one in five children and young people aged 8 to 25 experiencing a mental health problem in 2023. Despite this, mental health is not always adequately considered in the attendance debate. That’s why we wanted to shed light on the links between attendance and mental health, and the wider barriers to school attendance.
We observed that school attendance and rising levels of mental health problems have risen in close relationship. The data suggests a link between school absence rates and mental health problems; in Autumn 2022, children with a mental health problem were seven times more likely to have missed 15 days of school than those without a mental health problem (NHS Digital, 2023).
