Attendance at school has become an increasingly important area of focus at the Department of Education, and therefore within English schools. Legal precedent means pupils are expected to attend every school session. Whilst the large increase in overall absence in the immediate post-Covid 19 period is reducing slowly over time, schools are required to actively promote attendance and prevent non-attendance at school.
In this post, we will look at the key measures which have been developed to flag – and tackle – levels and types of absence deemed particularly problematic. It should be noted that the terms attendance and absence are used somewhat interchangeably by the Department of Edcuation. The main Pupil Attendance in Schools, for example, reports absence figures rather than attendance.
Absence in England is recorded as either authorised (usually because a child is ill or has one of a number of specified reasons for not attending school) or unauthorised (either a O code for unauthorised absence, U for arrival after registration closes or G for an unauthorised term-time holiday; N if the reason for absence is not yet established).
English schools have had a measure of Persistent Absence – a threshold of school days missed which is flagged as problematic – since 2005/6. This has been joined in recent years by two further measures of problematic absence –a Severe Absence measure and a ‘10 in 10’ threshold for penalty fines for unauthorised absence. The methodology for these statistics is available here.
Overall Attendance/Absence, Persistent Absence, Severe Absence and the ‘10 in 10’ threshold
Overall Attendance/absence figures have been published since 2005/6. These are published for state primary, secondary and special schools, and there is a single overall figure summarising the attendance/absence of every pupil in state education in Years 1 to 11 (those who were from aged 5 to 16 on 31 August in the academic year).
Since 2024, weekly figures for those in Y1-11 have been published as well for the academic year to date (usually two weeks in arrears). Figures for Authorised and Unauthorised absence rates are also published weekly and for the academic year to date.
As we reported here, schools have been encouraged to record absences as unauthorised where possible, with few categories other than illness (which makes up the bulk of authorised absences) being recorded authorised absence.
Persistent Absence was first introduced in 2005/6. At this time, a pupil was flagged if they had missed more than 20% of all possible school sessions (a session being a half day of school). It did not matter if the absence was authorised or unauthorised; overall absence beyond 20% flagged a pupil as Persistently Absent from school.
The threshold changed to 15% in 2010/11 and then 10% in 2015/6, and it should be noted that the methodology has changed significantly over time, tightening up the definitions and calculations involved. This makes it somewhat tricky to make comparisons across the years since 2005/6 and now.
At population level, high levels of absence are correlated with lower outcomes. As we reported previously, ‘The education of the minority of students who miss large amounts of schooling is negatively impacted by their time away from learning; there is a clear link between absence and attainment and this link is consistent over time’.
The Persistent Absence figure encourages schools to tackle issues relating to pupils missing more than 10% of their schooling, regardless of the reason for their time out of school.
Severe Absence was introduced as a measure in 2023/24 (it did not appear in the equivalent 2022/23 report). It was calculated retrospectively for the years from 2016/17 to 2023/24. A pupil is flagged as Severely Absent where they have missed 50% or more of possible sessions, authorised or authorised.
As with the Persistent Absence figures, the Severe Absence figure does not differentiate the reason for time out of school as it is designed to ensure schools to give top priority to support those pupils who miss more than half of their schooling.
The ‘10 in 10’ threshold was introduced in 2024/25 to address the lack of consistency across Local Authorities when issuing penalty fines for unauthorised attendance at school, as we reported here. Unlike the reporting on Persistent Absence and Severe Absence, the 10 in 10 threshold is explicitly designed to address unauthorised absence rather than all absence.
As such, it is a rolling measure, so absences in previous terms or school years are taken into account when flagging unauthorised absences. The guidance notes that, ‘schools should not have a blanket position of issuing or not issuing penalty notices and should make judgements on each individual case (para 181)’.
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