On Friday 14 March Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson spoke at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) unions’ annual conference warning of the ‘damage’ of frequent absence on children’s lives.
Research published by the Department for Education on the same day demonstrates the crucial link between school attendance, educational attainment and lifetime earnings, and reinforces the urgent need to work in partnership to address absence in schools.
This urgency has been reasserted by today’s report from the The Education Policy Institute (EPI) into school absences. The EPI’s evidence shows that unauthorised school absences are the leading driver of the widening educational attainment gap. Finally, with the Lost Learning Coalition set to publish their report into the scale of lost learning across schools in England tomorrow, the rising evidence base around the school attendance crisis shows that the time for action from the Government is now.
In response to the speech CEO Jaine Stannard, of the school attendance charity School-Home Support, said:
“The Government is getting it right on school absence – highlighting the importance of good attendance and mandating support-led family-centred approaches – but we need to go further and faster with targeted attendance support if we are to tackle the scale of the crisis we face.
The Government must use its Spending Review to fund whole family support practitioners for every school – using the School-Home Support model and approach as the blueprint.
By providing early intervention and intensive support to the families of children who are starting to miss significant chunks of school we can prevent issues from escalating and children becoming severely absent (missing at least 50% of school).
School-Home Support’s School Attendance Gap Day highlights that 158,000 ‘severely absent children’ had their effective last day of school on the 4th February – meaning they are missing huge amounts of learning of all kinds.
We welcome the national leadership Bridget Phillipson is showing on this issue and call on her to use the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to strengthen whole family support approaches to tackling absence – building on the existing measures in the Bill and Attendance Mentors Programme.”