Following the worrying attendance statistics, we wrote to the Minister for School Standards, Catherine McKinnell, to request that the school attendance measures in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill are strengthened to reflect the growing evidence base around school attendance.
Government support for our three amendments to the bill would reflect the growing evidence base around the long term consequences of school absence, as well as growing recognition of the impact that whole family support approaches to tackling absence could have on providing long term solutions to the absence problem.
We are calling for:
- A whole family support worker for every school
- Schools mandated and resourced to upskill staff in family engagement techniques
- The introduction a vulnerability code in school registers
The recent official statistics on pupil absence demonstrated that the rate of severe absence has increased to 2.3% for the 2023/2024 academic year. This means that for 171,000 pupils their last day at school was on the 4 February 2025 – as per our School Attendance Gap Day Campaign. Severe absence has increased by 184% since 2018/19’s data and while the persistent absence rate has improved, this still remains at 1 in 5 pupils in England.
Importantly, this comes as the evidence base around the consequences of not attending school develops:
- DfE research into educational attainment demonstrated that at both Key State 2 and Key Stage 4 levels, the higher the 5% attendance band a pupil is in during the assessment year, the more likely they were to achieve a successful outcome in 2022/23;
- DfE research into lifetime earnings found that persistently absent pupils in secondary school could earn £10,000 less at age 28 compared to pupils with near-perfect attendance – this rises to nearly £20,000 for those children who are severely absent. Meanwhile, the likelihood of being in receipt of benefits increases by 2.7% for persistently absent KS4 pupils and 4.2% for severely absent KS4 pupils;
- A report by the Education Policy Institute established that school absences were a key driver of the widening educational attainment gap.
Therefore, any Government action around the school attendance crisis should reflect the growing evidence base around the consequences of not attending school.