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Attendance drive: DfE to require schools to share daily attendance data

Attendance Government policy
The government has confirmed it will legislate “in the coming months” to require all schools to share their daily attendance data in a bid to help them identify and respond to absence trends.
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Ministers have also pledged to support more than one million children and young people who do not attend school regularly via an expansion of the Attendance Hubs initiative.

And the on-going attendance mentoring pilot programme is also to be expanded to reach persistent or severely absent students in 10 new areas from September.

Last academic year (2022/23), 7.5% of sessions were missed by pupils – with a third of these being unauthorised absences.

Persistent absence – the proportion who miss 10% or more of sessions – hit 22.3%. This is down on 27.5% the previous school year, which means around 380,000 fewer students were persistently absent.

Broken down by phase, in 2022/23 17.2% of primary pupils and 28.3% of secondary students missed at least 10% of school (DfE, 2023a).

In December, in its response to the House of Commons Education Select Committee’s investigation into absence, the DfE acknowledged that “there remains a long way to go to achieve the goal of achieving pre-pandemic attendance levels or better” (UK Parliament, 2023).

So far this academic year, things have improved with 6.6% of sessions missed (5.1% at primary level and 8.3% at secondary level). Again, roughly one-third of these were unauthorised.

And a new analysis this week from FFT Datalab of attendance data from 10,000 schools covering autumn term 2023 shows that persistent absence at primary level is 17% while at secondary level it is 24.8% (Benyon, 2024).

A persistently absent student would have missed at least seven days of school during the autumn term.

Attendance Hubs provide tailored support to pupils and their families to help reduce absence from school. They are run by schools with excellent track records in boosting attendance.

The Department for Education (DfE) has unveiled plans to open 18 new hubs across six regions in a bid to support 2,000 schools. The move will bring the total number of hubs in operation to 32.

The hubs use a range of tactics to engage with pupils and their families, including breakfast clubs and extra-curricular activities, as well as undertaking analysis of attendance data to identify trends and solutions.

The DfE is also to increase the support being offered to families via the attendance mentoring pilot programme.

The initiative has been given £15m over three years and charged with offering “intensive support” to more than 10,000 persistent or severely absent pupils. Up until now it has been operating in Middlesbrough, Doncaster, Knowsley, Salford, and Stoke on Trent. The project will expand to cover a further 10 areas from September 2024.

Barnardo’s, which has been running the pilot mentoring programme, said that in Middlesbrough 82% of the children they have worked with have improved their attendance.

In making its latest announcements, the DfE confirmed that it will legislate later this year to require all schools to share their attendance data.

The DfE publishes fortnightly updates on school attendance based on data shared voluntarily by schools. Currently roughly 80% to 90% of schools regularly share their data.

The DfE announcement stated: “The government has committed to further legislation in the coming months that will mean all schools will be required to share their daily school registers.”

Schools share their data automatically via a third party portal. Schools which do so get access to daily attendance reports that are intended to help them to identify absence trends and provide “early support and intervention”.

An analysis from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) last term found that attendance was one of the biggest barriers to progress for disadvantaged children.

Professor Becky Francis, chief executive of the EEF, said: “The evidence on how to support pupil attendance is limited – something the EEF is working to rectify through current research projects testing the effectiveness of a range of approaches, co-funded by the Youth Endowment Fund.

“But what it does show, is that the interventions schools choose to deploy should be responsive and tailored to meet individual pupils’ needs.”

Elsewhere, the DfE is to launch a national communications campaign – entitled Moments Matter, Attendance Counts – targeted at parents and carers and underlining the importance of attendance while also signposting families to sources of support.

Education secretary Gillian Keegan said: “We want all our children to have the best start in life because we know that attending school is vital to a child’s wellbeing, development, and attainment as well as impact future career success. I am hugely grateful to all our brilliant teachers, heads, and everyone who has worked with us to make the progress we’ve already made with 380,000 fewer children persistently absent.”

Commenting on the recent announcements, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that investment in support services was crucial to help schools bring absence rates down: “While there is nothing wrong with the expansion of attendance hubs, schools need more than advice. Over the last decade we have seen the crucial support services that used to step in and tackle persistent absence eroded and it is immensely frustrating that the government is only now slowly beginning to realise the impact that has had. What we need to see is a much stronger commitment to restoring those services so that every family and child that needs support gets it quickly. This cannot be done on the cheap.”