Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department holds data on pupil absence in primary schools in England which is cross-tabulated by school week, year group and reason for absence.

The Department does not hold absence data by school week. Absence data by year group and reason is available in the National Statistics release ‘Pupil absence in schools in England 2017 to 2018’, which is available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/pupil-absence-in-schools-in-england-2017-to-2018.

In the underlying data, the file ‘Absence_3term_201718_national_characteristics.csv’ has data for primary schools by national curriculum year group and reason. The data in this file can be filtered by the columns ‘Year’, ‘School Type’ and ‘Characteristics’.