Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to help ensure that guidance and resources for School Attendance Support Teams includes young carers.
The department wants to ensure that young carers have the best life chances by supporting them in their education. We recognise that absence from school is almost always a symptom of wider needs and barriers that a family are facing and is often also the best early indication of need in a family that may not be in contact with other services.
The department’s expectations of local authorities and schools, as set out in the ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance, were made statutory on 19 August 2024 and include specific reference to young carers. The ‘support first’ ethos of the attendance guidance is that pupils and families, including young carers, should receive holistic, whole-family support to help them overcome the barriers to attendance they are facing. This includes holding regular meetings with the families of pupils who the school, and/or local authority, consider to be vulnerable to discuss attendance and engagement at school. Schools are expected to recognise that absence is a symptom and that improving pupil’s attendance is part of supporting the pupil’s overall welfare. This ethos is reflected in resources provided to schools on school attendance, and our Attendance Toolkit for Schools includes reference to supporting young carers in its self-assessment tool.
The guidance can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance.
The toolkit can be accessed via: https://attendancetoolkit.blob.core.windows.net/toolkit-doc/Attendance%20toolkit%20for%20schools.pdf.
The department also publishes daily attendance data fortnightly and will continue to monitor the quality of data on young carers that is collected via the school register for consideration to include in the daily data collection in the future.