Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to reduce absence rates of pupils in (i) primary and (ii) secondary schools.

Improving attendance is one of the department’s top priorities. The department has published guidance encouraging all schools and local authorities to adopt the practices of the most effective schools. The ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance.

All schools are now expected to publish an attendance policy and appoint an attendance champion. Local authorities are expected to meet termly with schools to agree individual plans for at risk children. The department’s attendance hubs now support 800 primary, secondary and special schools benefiting over 400,000 pupils.

The department has also launched a £2.32 million attendance mentor pilot which aims to deliver intensive one to one support to persistently and severely absent pupils in 5 Priority Education Investment Areas.

To help identify children at risk of persistent absence, and to enable early intervention, the department has established a timelier flow of pupil level attendance data through the daily attendance data collection. 87% of state-funded schools subscribe to the tool to spot at risk pupils.

Across all phases, around 380,000 fewer pupils were persistently absent or not attending school in 2022/23 than in 2021/22. Daily data for 2022/23 show secondary school absence of 9.3%, down from 10.0% absent or not attending school for Covid related reasons in 2021/22. For primary schools, daily data for 2022/23 show absence of 6.0%, down from 7.0% absent or not attending school for Covid related reasons in 2021/22.