Absent Minds: How To Solve The Crisis Of School Absenteeism?
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
7 min read
Absenteeism is undermining the education of children in poorer areas, including those that do attend regularly. Noah Vickers reports on why so many are missing classes and the efforts to repair the damage
Something, it seems, snapped during the pandemic when it came to attitudes to schooling. Those months confined at home appear to have washed away a sense of obligation among some parents to ensure that children attended, especially in poorer households.
The consequences for the life chances of those children, it hardly needs explaining, are dire. But absenteeism is a problem not just for them but also for their classmates who attend regularly and whose learning is disrupted.
Little wonder then, that the need to bring down rates of persistent and severe absenteeism has become a major policy priority.
In Baroness Spielman’s final annual report as Ofsted’s chief inspector in 2023, she warned that the “social contract” between schools and families had become “fractured” in the wake of Covid.
While in pre-pandemic years, Spielman said there had been an “unwritten agreement” that parents always sent their children to school, the lockdowns of 2020 triggered “a troubling shift” in attitudes.
Focus group data from research agency Public First illustrates this change, as it reveals many parents no longer believe their children need to be in school full time. Instead, they view attending school as “one of several – often competing – options or demands on their child on a daily basis”.
One mother of children aged five and 10 in Manchester told her focus group: “Pre-Covid, I was very much about getting the kids into school, you know, attendance was a big thing. Education was a major thing.
“After Covid, I’m not gonna lie to you, my take on attendance and absence now is like, I don’t really care anymore. Life’s too short.”
In the 2018/19 school year, the overall absence rate was 4.7 per cent – measured as the total number of sessions missed due to absence, as a percentage of the total number of possible sessions for all pupils. By 2021/22, this had jumped to 7.6 per cent, and in the current school year, the rate has dropped only to 6.7 per cent.
The government is more worried about the rise of ‘persistent absenteeism’, where a pupil misses more than 10 per cent of school sessions in a year, and ‘severe absenteeism’, where they miss more than half.
Persistent absenteeism remains stubbornly high, at 18 per cent of pupils in the current school year – up from 10.9 per cent before the pandemic. Meanwhile, the severe absence rate last year hit a record high of 2.3 per cent, or 171,000 children. This was up from 0.8 per cent, or a little over 60,000 children, in 2018/19.
Public First found in their 2023 report: “A ‘Pandora’s Box’ has been opened and it will be incredibly difficult to close it again.”
The need to get children back into school may seem obvious, but the effects are far-reaching, and have consequences even for children who have continued to attend regularly.
Not only does material need to be taught several times in classrooms with mixed levels of attendance – slowing down learning for students who always come into school – but new analysis earlier this year showed that absence is “a key and growing driver” of the gap in academic attainment between economically advantaged and disadvantaged pupils.
Research by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) think tank found that if disadvantaged students had the same level of absence as their advantaged peers in 2023, the attainment gap would have been almost 10 per cent smaller at age 11 and 20 per cent lower at age 16.
Indeed, the EPI concluded that the growth in the attainment gap since 2019 among 16-year-olds can be “entirely explained” by higher levels of absence for disadvantaged pupils.
Keen to show her resolve in tackling the crisis, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has toured the country, sharing stern words with teachers about the urgency of getting pupils back into their lessons.
Speaking this month at a conference in Birmingham, Phillipson said that although parents are responsible for sending their children to school, a “big chunk” of the problem is “under the control of school leaders”.
In an earlier speech to teachers across London, she warned: “I expect schools falling behind on attendance to catch up, and fast, because we all know that children’s life chances are at stake.”
Yet those who have worked in schools over recent years tell The House that poor attendance should be at least partly understood as symptomatic of a system that has failed to support pupils with their mental health, or identify when they may have special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
We've got lots of data that tells us that young people in this country are among the most unhappy in Europe, and we ignore this at our own peril
Peter Swallow, Labour MP for Bracknell and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Schools, says the issue “massively” concerns him and his cross-party colleagues.
“We know that the number one thing to support all children – SEND children in particular, but actually all children – is structure,” he points out. “That’s why it was so difficult during the pandemic, and I was a teacher during the pandemic. Teaching online was really difficult.
“It did feel after we’d got back in the classroom that children had lost the routine of being in school, and that was hugely difficult. I think that is part of the challenge going forwards.
“What I would also say though is we were seeing rising numbers of kids with SEND, and we were seeing rising issues with attendance, before the pandemic. So, I think we are kidding ourselves if we think we can just ride out this wave. I think we do have to do the hard graft.”
Swallow is hopeful that the government’s plan to roll out free breakfast clubs in every primary school will play a role in restoring attendance.
“Given the number of children who have anxiety about going into school, giving them that space to regulate [their emotions], to get ready in a calmer, ‘low stakes’ environment, before the school day starts, is going to be really transformative for a lot of kids,” he says.
“It’s also going to help parents. Parents with working responsibilities can get kids into school and head off to work.”
The government claims the policy will save families up to £450 per year, and it has been welcomed by Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, as he argues poor attendance has a clear connection with child poverty and the longer-term impacts of austerity.
“So much about what we’ve seen taken and stripped away from our communities over the last decade is coming home to roost right now, and we’re seeing it in poor attendance; we’re seeing it in poor mental health,” he says.
“We’ve got lots of data that tells us that young people in this country are among the most unhappy in Europe, and we ignore this at our own peril.”
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
Can the situation be turned around? Emily Hunt, lead author of the EPI’s report on how absence rates have worsened the ‘attainment gap’ between pupils, says there are reasons for optimism, as much of the “lost ground” in students’ learning at key stages 2 and 4 has been recovered due to the “tremendous efforts” of teachers.
But she stresses the need for a new government strategy on pupil absence to target its “root causes”, including improved identification of children with SEND, and investing in better mental health support, both in and outside of schools.
Pupils must also feel a greater “sense of belonging”, Hunt adds, which in practice means children feeling safe in school and not experiencing anxiety about going in each day.
“There are real issues, particularly as children transition from primary to secondary school, and actually from year 7 into year 8, where we see a big drop-off in a number of these indicators around school engagement, safety, anxiety, belonging – particularly for girls – which we think needs addressing.”
She admits, however, there is also a lack of evidence for solutions to the issue: “It feels that we know more about the nature of the problem than we do about what works in addressing it.”
