Education ministers are increasingly worried about the long-term impact of Covid-19 on pupil attendance, and they’re right to be.

The most recent figures, from 11 November, show that on that date 8.5 per cent of pupils (just under 700,000) were missing from school.

Only 1.6 per cent were absent because they had or suspected they had Covid. Before the pandemic around 4.5 per cent of pupils were not in on any given day, so there does seem to have been a substantial increase, even excluding the Covid absentees. (Though the figures were measured slightly differently, so aren’t directly comparable).

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We do not know for sure why this is happening. There have been some other nasty illnesses circulating this term, which may account for part of the increase.

The wrong solution 

But talking to heads in more disadvantaged areas suggests there is a group of young people, more prevalent in older year groups within secondary schools, who have never properly returned from the lockdowns. We can see from the data that the problem is worse in secondaries, with fewer than 90 per cent of students attending.

It’s worse for vulnerable or disadvantaged groups: 13 per cent of secondary pupils on free school meals were missing; 16 per cent on an education, health and care plan (EHCP); and 22 per cent with a social worker. Fully 40 per cent of pupils in alternative provision were absent.

The Department for Education has responded today with a somewhat anaemic announcement that they are hiring five attendance advisers to support schools and local authorities.

It is unclear how five people, however impressive, are supposed to help 152 local authorities and over 20,000 schools to deal with this challenge.

But even if 500 advisers were being hired, this would be a sticking plaster solution to a structural problem that has become more apparent during the pandemic.

The academy question 

As more and more schools have become academies - 80 per cent of secondaries and almost 40 per cent of primaries now - local authorities have seen their responsibilities for maintaining schools diminish. Their funding has been cut substantially, even for the schools they are still responsible for.

Yet they still have a raft of statutory responsibilities that cannot be fulfilled at the level of an individual school or multi-academy trust.

Most of these relate to the most vulnerable young people in the system: those with special educational needs or disabilities; those in need of child protection; those who have been excluded from mainstream education; or those have otherwise fallen through the cracks in the system and are not going to school.

But without resources or, in many cases, the necessary powers over non-maintained schools, they are struggling to meet these responsibilities.

When the pandemic hit, the DfE tried to run the response centrally, rather than rely on LAs. Indeed, they even threatened to sue authorities like Greenwich who wanted to close schools as the second wave of Covid cases rose last December.

Schools caught in the middle

This undoubtedly made life harder for schools, caught between differing advice from their LA and the DfE, and having to deal with endless streams of national-level guidance that was not targeted at the specific needs of their area. 

This, and the ongoing problems with pupil absence that we’re now seeing, should be a wake up call to the new ministerial team.

Their big policy White Paper, due in the first half of next year, needs to clarify LA’s role and give them the necessary powers to fulfil that role. This will require looking at, for instance, the responsibilities of academies to provide data to LAs on attendance and other factors.

But it will also mean engaging with the thorny question of what powers LAs need to properly engage all schools in their areas with wider service provision.

At the moment, the relationship between LAs and academies is very dependent on good faith - which does exist in most cases - but it needs a statutory footing.

Resource concerns

Ministers will also need to look at LA resourcing. The “high needs” funding block that is supposed to support children with SEND and outside mainstream provision is under extreme pressure because of the rapid rise in requests for EHCPs.

The DfE will have a difficult decision to make as to whether they take some of the additional funding assigned to schools in the spending review and put it into “high needs” and give LAs autonomy over how to use it instead.  

As the ongoing problem of persistent absence shows, some things have to be done at the local level and require a level of co-ordination that individual schools cannot support.

The problem has been left on the “too difficult” pile for too long, and the need for a solution is becoming urgent.  

Sam Freedman is a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a senior fellow at the Institute of Government