How are schools tackling pupil absence around the world?

“Students’ regular attendance at school and punctuality improved between 2018 and 2022 by two to five percentage points,” according to analysis of countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Let that sink in: attendance has improved in most of the 38 countries in the OECD since the pandemic, according to the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment, published in December 2023.

In the UK it’s hard to believe that this could be the case, with recent figures on persistent absence showing that children are all too often failing to turn up for school.

England’s children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, has declared a school attendance “epidemic” and made it her “mission to ensure persistently and severely absent children get the support they need to return to school”.

Yet the figures on persistent absence - pupils missing at least 10 per cent of classes - show that England does not even have the worst rate in the UK.

UK school attendance trends

At secondary schools in Scotland in 2023-24, 40.6 per cent of students were persistently absent. In Wales it was 37.1 per cent; in Northern Ireland, 32.1 per cent; and in England, 23.9 per cent.

Given these figures, it would be easy for those in the UK to assume that absence is a global problem accelerated by the Covid pandemic, when children and families got out of the habit of going to school.

However, the OECD is clear that overall attendance improved post-pandemic.

The UK is not alone in bucking the trend, though. The 2022 Pisa report shows that while attendance improved overall between 2018 and 2022, for one in 10 countries and economies, “the incidence of truancy and lateness increased”.

More on attendance:

• How attendance in England compares with the rest of the world
• Why schools can’t separate attendance from mental health and SEND
• Using student leadership to improve school attendance

So, who are the UK’s unfortunate bedfellows?

There are eight OECD countries - including Australia, Canada and the US - where the proportion of 15-year-olds who skipped a whole day of school in the two weeks before the Pisa test grew by more than five percentage points.

In 2018, this applied to 18.8 per cent of students in the UK; by 2022, it was 26.8 per cent.

In the US in 2022, 29 per cent of students reported skipping a day of school, up from 19.9 per cent in 2018. In Canada, the 2022 figure was 28.6 per cent, up from 23.2 per cent. Most remarkable was Australia: 43 per cent of students reported skipping school in 2022, up from 33 per cent in 2018.

These figures can be set against an OECD average of 19.8 per cent in 2022 - a fall from 21.9 per cent in 2018. Countries showing an improvement in self-reported truancy include France, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany.

This was also the case for Japan: in 2018, just 2.1 per cent of students reported skipping a whole day of school; by 2022 this had dropped to an extremely low 1.6 per cent.

Long-term absenteeism was also more common in the UK: 11.4 per cent of students participating in Pisa reported being off at least once for more than three consecutive months. In Australia it was 9.3 per cent; in Canada, 8.3 per cent; and in the US, 6.6 per cent.

The OECD average in 2022 was 7.6 per cent.

The Pisa report says long-term absenteeism was “uncommon”, but notes that it was “particularly harmful to students’ academic success, especially at higher levels of education”.

What schools can do about long-term absence

The most common reason given for missing school for long periods of time was illness, although “boredom or a lack of safety at school” were frequently cited by students taking part in Pisa.

The report states: “While schools can do little to prevent illness, they can address a lack of motivation among students, and much can be done to make schools safer.”

Miyako Ikeda, a senior analyst at the OECD directorate for education and skills, links various potential factors affecting rates of student absenteeism, including: the disciplinary climate, teacher support, parental engagement and students’ sense of belonging in school.

Australia’s scores declined on all these measures between Pisa 2018 and 2022. The UK was stable for sense of belonging - which captures whether students feel liked by their peers and are awkward or lonely at school - but declined on the other measures.

‘A sense of belonging at school seems to play a very important role in attendance’

The length of the Covid lockdowns has also had an influence, Ikeda suggests: the Pisa data shows that in Canada, the US and the UK, school closures tended to last longer than the OECD average.

Ikeda rules out bullying as a reason for students increasingly turning their backs on school. According to the Pisa data, bullying decreased in the UK, US, Australia, Canada and Japan.

The Pisa data does have limitations, however. In Japan, Ikeda says the apparently “rosy” picture around attendance is one that the government is unlikely to recognise: the country’s own data shows a record number of students refusing to attend school.

Figures released by the Japanese government in November 2024 show that in 2023, 346,482 students were recorded as absent for 30 days or more - an increase of 47,434, or 15.7 per cent, on the previous year. It was the 11th consecutive annual rise.

Ikeda suggests that because Pisa only involves 15-year-olds, the assessments fail to pick up on the most disengaged students in Japan. Compulsory schooling in Japan has ended by that age - so if Pisa asked the same questions to 14-year-olds, the result could be quite different.

Multiple reasons for missing school

The most common reasons for non-attendance recorded by Japanese schools were: lack of motivation; anxiety or depression; breakdown in routines; poor academic performance and friendship issues.

Japan’s education ministry reportedly attributed the rise in non-attendance to the pandemic but also to a lack of adequate support for students with special needs, and parents choosing not to force their children to attend.

The reality is there are dozens of factors behind a fall in school attendance, which is why it is so difficult for governments to respond, says Lucie Cerna, another senior OECD analyst, who has been working with closely with countries such as the Republic of Ireland, Norway and Slovakia on how to tackle pupil absence.

Before Covid, non-attendance was generally viewed as an upper-secondary issue, and the biggest concern was improving the attendance of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Now “it’s quite widespread in terms of the student profile”, Cerna says.

“It’s still students from disadvantaged backgrounds, it’s immigrant students, it’s students with special needs - but many countries now say it’s also students from more advantaged backgrounds.”

A sense of belonging at school seems to play “a very important role” in attendance, Cerna explains. This could have been “damaged” or “interrupted” by Covid and schools are struggling to “recreate this connection”.

Impact of teacher shortages

Other researchers suggest that teacher shortages - and teacher burnout - could be making it harder for students to build and maintain relationships, with an impact on the continuity of education and levels of disengagement.

Cerna agrees with the Japanese government that parents are now perhaps more likely, following the pandemic, to keep their children off school. Deteriorating mental health and pupils not having their support needs met are also factors.

But bigger philosophical issues also come into play, says Cerna: “There are a lot of questions around: what is the purpose of education and schools? Why does it matter? Why is it important? Is the curriculum engaging? What can I do after school?”

She notes that falling school attendance in Japan has prompted the government to introduce “some alternative school types” where the curriculum is more practical and relevant for working life.

“It’s been quite successful and my understanding is they are planning to open more of them,” Cerna says.

Experts are clear, however, that there are no quick fixes.

In England the policy response has been “quite extensive”, says Cerna, but the feedback is that improvements are “very, very slow”.

Analysts who spoke to Tes are clear that good data is crucial and punitive approaches to absenteeism do not work.

In England, data collection and monitoring have been “revamped”, says Cerna, meaning that the government can see when students are attending and whether there are changes in absence rates depending on the day or time of year.

The importance of data

In countries with data showing this granular detail, patterns are emerging: Fridays, Cerna says, are “a particularly popular day not to come to school”. Families taking holidays during term time is also proving problematic.

This trend, in particular, has been a hot topic in the UK. In England in 2023-24, the number of fines issued to parents for unauthorised term-time holidays increased by almost a quarter.

Some academics argue that all types of absence are equally damaging, but there is some debate about the impact of term-time holidays.

Kirsten Hancock, an attendance expert in Australia, conducted research in 2019 that found no relationship between term-time holidays and the results of standardised literacy and numeracy tests. Other unauthorised absences had an impact on education outcomes.

‘Fines do nothing to address the actual causes of missing school’

Experts say schools need good data of their own so they can identify problems before absence patterns become entrenched.

“You can’t do much if you don’t get up-to-date information,” says Cerna.

On punitive approaches and parent fines, Cerna says the feedback from the countries that have them, or have tried them, is that they are “not very helpful” and that “most of the time they affect the parents that actually need most support”.

In comments made in a conversation published online in July 2024, as well as in a paper published in 2023 looking at student absenteeism, Hancock makes it clear that she sees non-attendance as typically a “symptom of something else”. She says: “These fines do nothing to address the actual causes of missing school, which are highly varied, typically complex and look different from family to family.”

She also dismisses punitive approaches including referrals to court systems and “impersonal” or “poorly framed” school communications.

The laziness myth

In 2023 Tes wrote about a Scottish primary school that replaced the rather austere standardised letters that it had sent out in response to non-attendance with more empathetic versions that explained the support available. The result was a flurry of engagement from families and the realisation that many pupils were anxious about attending school.

Assumptions are often made about why students do not attend, says Hancock - that they are “lazy” or their parents “don’t care” or they would rather be playing video games. Schools need to communicate with families and find out what the true barriers are, she says.

“Negative communications from schools and education departments, or talk of ‘truancy crackdowns’ by politicians, do little to build trust or the positive relationships necessary to build rapport and engagement with families.”

In 2023 Hancock, who is national manager for research and evaluation at charity The Smith Family, which supports disadvantaged school students, travelled to the US and New Zealand to see how they tackled falling attendance.

In Illinois she found that the law had been changed in 2022 so that schools could move away from punitive approaches - now, instead of “sanctions”, the emphasis is on the “underlying causes of chronic truancy”. Illinois pupils can now take five “mental or behavioural health” days off per year.

These legislative changes have been accompanied in some Chicago schools by a “multi-tiered system of support” (MTSS) frameworks, designed to support student attendance. Tier one focuses on whole-school interventions designed to prevent absence; tier two is about early intervention; and tier three entails intensive interventions for chronic and severe attendance problems.

Research-informed interventions

Christopher Kearney, of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has written extensively on student attendance and multi-tiered support systems. He says interventions in the US have largely shifted to school-based approaches that include MTSS, which “have been found to help improve school attendance rates and reduce school absenteeism rates”.

One school Hancock visited reported that one of its best tier-one responses involved working with local businesses to ensure that students who went off campus for lunch were allowed to skip the queue, so they could get served promptly and be back on time for afternoon classes. The school had found that if students were likely to be 10 minutes late, they often did not bother coming back to school at all.

Increasingly, there is good information available on research-informed interventions for schools. For example, a rapid review by the Australian Education Research Organisation, published in January; a 2023 publication looking at strategies to reduce absenteeism, called Attendance Playbook; and the Education Endowment Foundation’s resource to support school leaders to improve attendance.

Suggested interventions include breakfast clubs; mentoring for students at risk of poor attendance; support for parents; “looping”, whereby students stay with the same teacher for more than one year; and taking restorative approaches to discipline. Illness is a common reason for non-attendance, so some research also suggests that good hand hygiene and vaccination programmes have a role to play in driving down absence rates.

However, the first steps that schools need to take are clear: they must know their data and their families. Only then do they stand a chance of employing the right interventions - and solving the intractable problem of student absence.

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