The number of school pupils who are persistently absent in England has doubled since the pandemic, Department for Education data shows.
This means one in five pupils is now persistently missing lessons.
And nearly a quarter of all absences are now recorded without a clear excuse.
The education secretary Bridget Phillipson says England is facing an “epidemic of school absence”, and last week announced new investment of £15 million in “attendance mentoring”.
FactCheck takes a look.
The pandemic effect?
The Department for Education defines a pupil as persistently absent if they miss one in ten school sessions. (Every school day consists of two “sessions” – a morning and an afternoon).
In 2014, around one in ten pupils in England met this threshold – that represented about 700,000 children.
And things stayed very stable up to 2019 – across this five year period, around one in ten pupils was persistently absent in every year. That equated to between 700,000 and 800,000 kids in each of those years.
Then the pandemic struck in March 2020, causing months of school closures – meaning that persistent absence figures weren’t even released for the spring term of that year.
But when schools finally returned to normal, things looked very different.
In the academic year ending 2022 – in other words, the first full post-pandemic school year- the number of persistently absent pupils had shot up, to around 1.6 million.
This represented nearly a quarter of all pupils – and was more than double the pre-pandemic average.
While the figures have come down slightly since then, there were still 1.4 million pupils persistently absent as of last autumn (the most recent school term for which data is available).
This represents one in five pupils – and that’s still almost double the pre-pandemic average.
Why are kids missing school?
So what happened, and why are kids missing so much school?
We don’t have a definitive answer, though we know there is a higher rate of persistent absence among students on Free School Meals. This was also the case before the pandemic.
The Department for Education holds data on the reasons for every missed school session.
Both before and after the pandemic, the single biggest reason for absence was illness – accounting for more than half of missed school sessions in every year over the past decade.
There has been recent public debate in England around parents taking their children out without permission for term-time holidays – and fines were recently increased to address the issue.
However, both before and after the pandemic, “unauthorised holidays” accounted for less than 10 per cent of missed sessions per year – so actually a small share of the total.
It’s important to bear in mind for both the above categories that the actual number of school sessions missed due to holidays and illness has increased since the pandemic. The percentage of sessions missed may have stayed about the same – but that’s only because the overall number of sessions missed has increased too.
No excuse for absence?
But which reason for school absence has seen the most significant growth since the pandemic?
Well, the category which has seen the biggest relative increase in missed school sessions is vague and ill-defined – “unauthorised other” reasons for absence.
In other words, pupils are out of school without permission, but it’s not clear why. It’s the second biggest reason for school absence, behind illness.
The Department for Education told us this category is usually ticked by teachers either when a parent hasn’t communicated why their child is absent, or when there is no clear reason for absence – for example, when a child simply refuses to come to school.
We questioned if children who are too anxious to come to school would fall under this category – but the Department told us these absences should be listed under illness.
Before the pandemic, this “unauthorised other” reasons category usually accounted for around 15 per cent of missed school sessions, but now it accounts for 22 per cent of absences – nearly a quarter of the total.
What is the government doing about it?
It’s believed that a rise in anxiety and other mental health issues has contributed to the post-pandemic surge in school absences.
Last week, the government announced an investment of £15 million to tackle school absences, via an “attendance mentoring” scheme. The scheme will target areas with the worst attendance rates, and will see “attendance mentors provide one to one support to persistently absent pupils”.
The stated aims of the mentoring scheme are to tackle some of the issues mentioned above – including addressing mental ill health, and helping pupils to manage anxious feelings.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said: “For too long persistent absence has held back young people across the country and denied them the life chances that they deserve: this government is gripping this generational challenge facing our schools.”
(IMAGE CREDIT: Mike Higginson/Shutterstock.)
