Susan Acland-Hood and Simon Blake explain how Covid prompted a new approach to tackling absence rates in schools in England
“It was identifying the leaves that helped us see the wood for the trees,” says Beth Gibson, assistant principal of the Queen Elizabeth Academy, a school serving a disadvantaged community in Atherstone, Warwickshire.
The ‘leaves’ to which Beth is referring are detailed data insights which she and other school leaders in England are now using to inform themselves about student absences, and which are helping address one of the big educational challenges of the post-Covid world.
“Post-pandemic, our school attendance had gone through the floor,” Beth explains. “But the new real-time information and analysis we can now access is helping us turn things around.”
Rising absences
Absence from school has increased sharply across the country in recent years – students in England missed on average 14 days a year in 2023/24, compared to around nine in 2018/19. Five extra days might not sound like much, but in that difference lie two very big problems (see Figure 1). First, a volume problem: one in five children – 1.5 million – are ‘persistently’ absent, meaning they miss the equivalent of one day of school every fortnight, or more. Second, a chronic problem: 1 in 50 – or 171,000 children – are ‘severely’ absent, missing half the days they should be in school, or more. Being absent for an extra two weeks over a year halves a student’s odds of getting a strong pass in English and Maths GCSE compared to a similar pupil with a strong attendance record. Persistent absence also worsens the risk of poor mental health and feeds through into higher unemployment and lower earnings. GCSE-age children who were persistently absent in 2006/7 earned £10,000 less per year at age 28 than those with good attendance records. Absence is also associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in risky sorts of behaviour – from drug and alcohol use to crime.
Faced with these human, economic and social costs, governments across the globe have been urgently searching for solutions – and in England one of these is better data. Working with teachers like Beth, teams at the Department for Education (DfE) have developed a tool that provides granular daily attendance numbers, increases transparency for school heads, local councils and parents, and drives accountability for dealing with this most difficult of issues.
Scourge of the pandemic
The story begins during the pandemic when, in an effort to track whether vulnerable children were attending school during lockdown, the DfE found itself with no alternative but to introduce burdensome new manual processes. Attendance at schools is recorded by teachers daily in classroom registers, but is captured nationally just three times a year through the school census. With quality assurance lead times, the data is only published two terms after it has been collected.
In the crisis was born an ambition: to find a way to track the attendance of 5–16 year-olds more quickly and frequently. We convened a small team operating across policy and data disciplines to think about the barriers and opportunities; we worked with schools, local authorities, attendance leads, trade unions, data protection specialists, and providers of management information systems; and we entered into a partnership with an education data aggregator. Together, we developed the technical capability to collect daily data on school attendance directly from schools.
Figure 1: Post-pandemic absence remains stubbornly high with two distinct challenges
We asked schools to approve the sharing of their data, subject to data sharing rules. The technical back end is largely invisible to the school. Each day, pupil-level register data – who has attended and who hasn’t, and the relevant attendance code – is recorded by teachers directly into a range of different management information systems. The data aggregator processes the numbers through a secure data pipeline in DfE, using our cutting-edge data platform.
The data is then played back at three levels. First, individual schools can access pupil-level data in near real time via a secure online portal, View Your Education Data (VYED). They can use a range of tools and services to analyse information, comparing themselves with national and local averages and trends over time. Second, local authorities can also access pupil-level data for students within their geographical boundaries, and with similar functionality. Third, local authority-level data is published fortnightly for public consumption. DfE analysts are able to access the full dataset for approved analytical purposes.
The project began on a voluntary basis, and adopters rose rapidly, peaking at over 90%. This early voluntary period was critical for building trust, helping develop the product, and controlling quality. A series of teething problems emerged and were resolved, ranging from schools using custom codes that the system couldn’t recognise, to deeper challenges such as the need to upgrade the supporting architecture and data platform to cope with the rapidly accelerating volumes of data.
It was critical, too, that the project formed part of a broader strategy to reset the narrative on school attendance and make this problem everyone’s business. DfE’s attendance policy division sought to redirect the system around a “support first” approach, a pivot based on evidence that higher post-Covid absences weren’t mainly about old-fashioned truancy but about something more complicated. There appears, for example, to have been a behavioural and attitudinal shift in the wake of Covid, with parents more relaxed about their children having occasional days off, more focused on wellbeing, and more liable to apply lower illness thresholds for keeping children at home. These patterns are mirrored elsewhere in society, such as in workforce absence and increased rates of working from home. Changed habits, meanwhile, have been accompanied by deeper social challenges. These include more unmet Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) demand, child poverty, and worse child and parental mental health (both actual increases in illness and more medicalisation of ordinary challenges).
What became apparent early on was the scale of the challenge. Collecting live operational data on more than 7 million children from over 20,000 schools, and ensuring that the exercise was adding value, was no small endeavour – particularly given the need to involve teachers and local authorities. But we also recognised that there was a great prize on offer – a high quality database giving real-time intelligence and full coverage of all state-funded schools (something which was achieved when the new government made participation mandatory for the 2024/25 academic year).
Spelling out the benefits
The first benefit of the project has been the public accountability that comes from regular data publication. The new tool allows us to publish provisional (given that it is live) data every two weeks, making England one of the most transparent countries in the world on this issue. More than once, ministers have ended up on the Today programme or in Parliament to respond to the latest numbers – feet held to the fire.
The second benefit has been an improved understanding of the problem. In combination with census data, daily data has fuelled more timely research, informing our national strategy and driving smarter local action. DfE recently convened 12 regional conferences aiming to share the insights set out in Box 1 with secondary schools, multi-academy trusts, and local authorities across the country.
Box 1: Seven attendance insights from daily data 1. Green shoots to build on: Pre-Covid, around two-thirds of children attended school almost every day (95%+ attendance; missing less than two weeks a year). This proportion fell to less than half post-Covid, a particular problem given that absence can be ‘contagious’. However, the data now shows a clear recovery in the number of children attending every day. Knowing this presents an opportunity for schools to celebrate and encourage the trend, rebuilding shared habits. 2. Twin track strategy: In 2023/24, children missing school 0-15% of the time accounted for 52% of lost days across primary and secondary schools, often composed of occasional days missed, compared to 22% of lost days from children who were severely absent. Schools need to target both the volume of absence and chronic absence, not just one part of the problem. 3. Quantifying the impact of absence: Post-Covid analysis using the daily data shows that, at every level of absence and controlling for other factors, more time in school sharply increases the odds of achieving strong GCSE results. Perhaps counterintuitively, the biggest gains lie in turning ‘okay’ attenders (around 90% of the year) into strong attenders (95%+). Even at 50% attendance, an extra week in school increases the odds of good GCSEs by 20% compared to a similar child. 4. The importance of transition: Absence rates increase with age, rising sharply not only on entry from primary to secondary school, but also within secondary school, particularly in the move from Year 7 to Year 8. The lesson is that schools need a plan that tackles the triple transition: into secondary, and then into Years 8 and 9. 5. Importance of early intervention: Tracking absence rates at pupil level over time underlines the importance of intervening early to prevent deterioration. In secondary schools, fewer than one in five children with absence rates of over 10% return to strong attendance the following year. 6. Granularity of approach: Better data allows focused targeting – for example, identifying children with unusual patterns, such as those missing school on particular days. Around 23% of absence falls on a Friday, compared to the 20% we would expect if it were randomly distributed, and schools tell us they can also see links to absence during particular lessons (stereotypically, PE or maths). 7. Reducing variation in absence between similar schools: Analysis suggests that a significant proportion of variation in attendance levels between schools is explained by the demographics of their intake (e.g., levels of deprivation, SEND, and ethnicity). While part of the balance will be down to unique factors and elements that cannot be modelled, a good chunk is likely to reflect differences in school-level practice. Leadership matters. |
The third benefit has been the tools and insight available to schools and local authorities. Previously, local authorities couldn’t routinely access comprehensive attendance data for all children – but they now have it at their fingertips. Oldham, for example, has used primary cohort data to predict which children are most at risk of being absent from secondary school. The local authority has shared this insight with the schools in its area, driving measurable reductions in absence (see the Oldham case study).
Schools have long been able to use the local data in their management information systems – but the DfE platform has offered new possibilities, including national and local benchmarking. The DfE has been investing in analytical tools, which include touch-of-a-button reports for individual schools to share with teachers and school governors, highlighting rates of absence over time, and by cohort. Trusts and local authorities can access such reports for all the schools they oversee.
This functionality is reflected in how schools and authorities engage with parents. Leveraging data effectively means understanding behaviour. For example, schools have told us about the importance of talking about ‘lessons missed’ rather than using percentages. Percentages can be confusing for parents whose expectations may be shaped by exam results – 85%, for instance, is typically a great result in a test, but it’s a really poor attendance rate, working out at 29 days of school being missed in a year.
Tackling transition attendance gaps in Oldham In Oldham, a troubling pattern emerged after the pandemic. Too many students were slipping through the cracks during the jump from primary (Year 6) to secondary (Year 7). Schools and the local authority didn’t have ready access to the attendance records of children arriving in Year 7, making it difficult to step in early. By the time attendance issues had become apparent, it was often too late. The introduction of the ‘Monitor Your School Attendance’ feature on the VYED service, allowed John Gilmore, analytical lead at Oldham Council, to track Year 6 attendance data, match it to school admissions, and flag students at risk before they set foot in secondary school. With this insight, council officers and school staff were able to take action during last year’s crucial summer transition period. They conducted over 350 home visits to children who had been persistently absent in Year 6, with help provided ranging from arranging transport and securing uniforms, to providing early intervention support. The result? A 4 percentage point attendance boost among targeted students, and more Year 7 students attending regularly than had done so in Year 6. The local authority identified one pupil without a uniform or the means to get to school and were able to provide both, so the student made it in on the first day. By combining data with proactive, hands-on support, Oldham has shown that attendance issues don’t have to be inevitable – they can be tackled before they begin. |
Visibility is key
The value of daily data is highlighted by its visibility within the education system. Our fortnightly attendance data publication is easily the most popular set of statistics published by the DfE. The number using our interactive tool is also growing rapidly, with over 300,000 interactions this year. But we are still learning about its potential applications.
One recent breakthrough, shared through our conference programme was what we call ‘banded’ data analysis. This involves looking at the severity of absence in five-percentage-point (roughly 10 days/year) bands, by year group, to develop a more granular picture. Beth Gibson has helped pioneer this approach. She says it has made her realise that attendance efforts at the Queen Elizabeth Academy were strategically lopsided, overwhelmingly focused on the most complex absences – where many of the drivers were beyond the classroom – and insufficiently directed towards prevention. She now better understands the absence rates of ‘grey’ children – those whose attendance record is not great, and therefore at risk of slipping into persistent absence, but not really on anyone’s radar. With the help of these individual ‘leaves’, to use her analogy, she has rebalanced her school’s efforts as a result, bringing down overall absence thanks to more early intervention. City Academy Norwich (see the Norwich case study) has also deployed the banded approach.
Turning the tide on attendance at City Academy Norwich In September 2022, City Academy Norwich found itself at a crossroads. The school, serving 690 students – many from disadvantaged backgrounds – was rated ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted. It had just joined the Sapientia Education Trust, and a new leader, Jo Franklin, faced a tough challenge. Too many students simply weren’t in school. Attendance was worryingly low, and persistent absence was alarmingly high. Jo implemented a new strategy using banded data analysis to tailor approaches as part of systematic data-led early intervention. This sat alongside three other elements: setting new, high expectations for attendance and behaviour; expanding specialist teaching for SEND children including improving the curriculum; and bringing in parents to the school as part of a wrap-around offer with hardship support. The results? Attendance has improved by 3.4 percentage points, persistent absence has dropped by 21%, and more students than ever are attending regularly. A fifth more students now attend strongly (95%+). Jo says that her experience proves that with the right tools, strong leadership, and a culture of support, it is possible to turn the tide on attendance – and change student lives in the process. |
Matching non-identifiable data opens up the possibility of better understanding areas where we currently lack good evidence – from Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET) to mental health – and leads to more informed policy decisions. In recent years, DfE has executed a census-based datashare with the Ministry of Justice using anonymised data to gain new insights into the link between education and crime.
A particular prize for local authorities, now able to export and match daily data at pupil level to other datasets, could be targeted operational sharing. For example, local health partners have expressed interest in using attendance data to measure and value the impact of health intervention.
A cultural shift
The daily attendance data project is more than just a technical innovation – it is a cultural shift. From national transparency to local insight, from strategic prevention to early intervention, it is helping educators, policymakers, and parents make better decisions in real time – and see the impact of those decisions quickly. There’s still more to learn, but the direction is clear. When we shine a light on the details, we don’t just see the problem – we start to solve it. As Beth Gibson reminds us, it’s the individual leaves that help us see the wood.
Susan Acland-Hood is Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education.
Simon Blake is Deputy Director, Attendance Policy at the Department for Education.
