Pupils: Coronavirus

(asked on 28th September 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what his Departments' policy is on measuring attendance rates at schools where children have been sent home from school due to a covid-19 outbreak.


Answered by
Nick Gibb Portrait
Nick Gibb
This question was answered on 1st October 2020

School attendance rates are based on the data collected via the termly school census. Data relating to the autumn term of the 2020-21 academic year will be collected as part of the spring 2021 census.

The Department has included an additional category ‘not attending in circumstances relating to coronavirus’ for use in situations as outlined in the following guidance: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-attendance/addendum-recording-attendance-in-relation-to-coronavirus-covid-19-during-the-2020-to-2021-academic-year.

Sessions recorded under this category will not count towards normal absence in the statistical releases derived from this data.

In addition to the termly school census, the Department is monitoring data collected daily from schools who are self-reporting and manually inputting data through a web portal each day. We ask schools where children have been sent home due to a COVID-19 outbreak to provide the number of pupils and students not attending due to a suspected or confirmed case of COVID-19, and those that have been requested to remain home due to a potential contact with COVID-19.

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