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School absence: Nothing beats knocking on doors

Attendance
The solution to soaring rates of school absence is simple – but expensive. Is this why both Labour and the Conservatives have avoided it in their recently unveiled attendance plans? Geoff Barton explains
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One of the biggest problems facing schools at present – as readers of SecEd will know only too well – is pupil absence.

The figures are grim with the latest data (DfE, 2023) showing that a quarter of pupils in secondary schools (25.2%) were persistently absent – compared to 12.7% before the pandemic.

Both the Conservative government and Labour opposition have recently made policy announcements on this issue about how they intend to fix the problem.

Labour’s plans include empowering Ofsted to review absence as part of annual safeguarding spot-checks, equipping every school with funding to deliver early language interventions, increasing mental health support through dedicated counsellors in every secondary school, reforming the curriculum, and providing universal free breakfast clubs in every primary school.

It's a mixed bag. Measures such as early language interventions, increased mental health support, and free breakfast clubs are sensible strategies which will help pupils who are often most likely to struggle with good attendance.

However, empowering Ofsted to review absence sounds more like a soundbite for the media. Labour must surely be aware that attendance is already a major focus in Ofsted inspections – the school inspection handbook mentions “attendance” 54 times. And reforming the curriculum – “to deliver a better foundation in reading, writing and maths while ensuring children do not miss out on music, sport, art and drama” – is vague to say the least.

Meanwhile, the government has announced “a major national drive to improve school attendance” which on closer examination amounts to more attendance hubs – that is, lead schools sharing ideas with other schools – and an attendance mentoring scheme which is aimed at providing direct support to more than 10,000 persistent and severely absent pupils and their families in some areas of the country (DfE, 2024).

While this is welcome, it is a fraction of what is needed considering that nearly 1.6 million pupils were persistently absent from school according to the government data.

What seems to be missing from either plan is meaningful immediate action at the scale necessary to tackle the problem. Labour’s plans are strong on interventions to support children but these policies – essential though they are – would take time to translate into improved pupil attendance.

In the meantime, the government’s plans are big on rhetoric, but feel like a low-cost sticking plaster to an issue which really requires far more investment.

Attendance isn’t just a matter for schools. It is also about all the services that support families and children in the community which are under so much pressure because of years of cutbacks, high demand – or indeed a mixture of both.

In particular, it seems to us that the most effective solution to poor attendance is to have attendance officers knocking on doors and talking directly to families about why children are missing school, what barriers there are to attendance and how these can be solved.

That is a service which is traditionally provided by local authorities. However, that service has been decimated over the past decade or so as a result of government cuts to local authority funding.

When we carried out a survey of headteachers last year, 81% said local authority attendance support services were inadequate (ASCL, 2023).

So, it seems to me that there is actually an immediate and direct solution available – more investment in local authority attendance support services – and that the actual question for policy-makers is whether they have the political will to do the obvious thing. The problem is, of course, that this is an expensive solution.

However, the damage caused by persistent absence is severe and the longer these high rates continue the worse it becomes. The children affected are, of course, less likely to achieve good educational outcomes, less likely to progress to further and higher education, and less likely to secure good and rewarding careers.

That is disastrous for them and also harmful to the national interest – it undermines our skills-base and affects the economy.

Maybe then, as is so often the case in education, spending the money that is needed to address this problem should be seen as an investment rather than a cost – one that provides a long-term dividend for children and for the country.

 

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