At the end of last term we saw high levels of illness-related absence. In fact, the weeks leading up to Christmas had some of the highest rates of any week this academic year or last. In today’s post, we’ll look at absence in Spring Term so far to see whether things have improved.
As usual, we’ll be using data from our Attendance Tracker schools – around 2,700 secondary and 7,200 primary. And we’re using data up to the end of last week, 17th February.
Absence rates this term have improved a lot compared with the last few weeks of Autumn Term. This has been driven by a big reduction in absence recorded as illness.
It’s hard to say for sure how things compare with pre-pandemic though. Historical data covers whole terms and we might expect absence to be higher in the winter months than the spring.
