Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the petition entitled Stop treating school refusal as truancy hosted by 38 Degrees from Not Fine in School, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of introducing a new legal attendance / absence code to measure the scale of school refusal.

The Department trusts schools to record, authorise and monitor attendance effectively and to work constructively with individual parents and pupils to improve school attendance where it is a problem.

The law places a duty on parents to ensure that their child attends school regularly where the child is of compulsory school age and registered at a school. The Education Act 1996 also sets out the situations in which an absent pupil will not be taken to have failed to attend school regularly, such as where the child was prevented from attending due to illness.

The Department recognises that mental health problems can have an impact on a pupil’s attendance and the guidance to schools is clear that they should authorise pupil absence due to illness (both physical and mental health related) unless they have genuine cause for concern about the veracity of an illness. If the authenticity of illness is in doubt, schools can request parents to provide medical evidence to support absence, but this is not mandatory.

The statutory Special Educational Need and Disability Code of Practice sets out the approach that schools should take when staff notice an emerging issue, including mental health issues. Where more serious problems occur, schools should expect pupils and families to be able to access support from specialist services.

Local authorities must arrange suitable full-time education for children of compulsory school age who, because of illness, would not receive suitable education without such provision. The Department’s statutory guidance states that local authorities should provide such education as soon as it is clear that a child will be away from school for 15 days or more, whether consecutive or cumulative.