Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what baseline data her Department uses to determine school-specific attendance improvement targets.

The department uses a combination of national and school-level data to determine each school’s attendance baseline improvement expectation (ABIE), which sets out the minimum improvement expected over an academic year.

ABIEs include a context-based factor, which compares a school’s previous year attendance with that of statistically similar schools. Similar schools are identified using characteristics such as free school meal eligibility, special educational needs, deprivation, funding levels, and region.

The reports headteachers receive also include pre-pandemic attendance benchmarks and local authority averages, providing schools with a “ladder of ambition” against which to benchmark improvements.