In Wales there has been an outcry. Last week the first comprehensive statistics on secondary school absence since 2019 were published, showing big increases in the proportion of students absent and persistently absent from school.
But in Scotland there is a relative dearth of this type of information in the public domain, despite widespread concern that pupils are just not turning up for school as much as they used to.
Traditionally, statistics on school attendance have been published only once every two years in Scotland, meaning that the most up-to-date figures available today were published in 2021, based on the 2020-21 school year.
Of course, much has changed since then, so to be relying on such dated information at a time when many headteachers are voicing concern about attendance - and education directors are talking about secondary students regularly taking a four-day week - is bad enough.
But to make matters worse, even when the new figures are published this December, the focus will be on attendance rates; there will be no information on the proportion of pupils persistently absent.
In contrast, in England and Wales these are the figures generating outrage - and action.
In 2022-23 in England, the overall school attendance rate was 92.5 per cent, compared with 95.3 per cent in 2018-19. The figures, therefore, reveal that attendance is down in the wake of pandemic, and these are the kind of figures that we will have for Scottish schools in December - but these are not the numbers making headlines, causing a stushie and putting pressure on the Department for Education in England to better support schools.
It is the proportion of pupils who are persistently absent from school that is causing most concern. In England a pupil is persistently absent if they miss more than 10 per cent of half-day sessions. More than one in five pupils were persistently absent in England in 2022-23 (22.3 per cent), compared with just 10.9 per cent in 2018-19.
The worrying rise in pupil absence
In Wales, meanwhile, the figures on secondary attendance published last week showed that overall attendance in 2022-23 was 87.5 per cent, compared with 93.8 per cent in 2018-19. It is a significant fall - non-attendance doubled - but, again, newspaper headlines concentrated on persistent non-attendance because it trebled, going from a steady 4 to 6 per cent prior to the pandemic (from 2013-14 to 2018-19) to 16.3 per cent last year.
In Wales a pupil is considered persistently absent if they miss more than 20 per cent of half-day sessions.
As a result of these figures, the governments in England and Wales have been forced to take action.
In England, the Commons Education Select Committee launched an inquiry into school attendance, which has just reported, and attendance hubs are being rolled out; in Wales, education minister Jeremy Miles has announced that a school attendance taskforce will be established.
In Scotland, meanwhile, education secretary Jenny Gilruth told the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee last week that she receives fortnightly updates on attendance, which “concern” her. She had asked Education Scotland to look at the issue “in more depth” and provide her with more advice. Ms Gilruth said that certain year groups seem to have “challenges” with attendance, that attendance is worse in some local authority areas - and that improving attendance is “key” to improving outcomes.
During Covid attendance was monitored and tracked more closely from the point schools reopened in August 2020, and that has continued. This year attendance figures are - as Ms Gilruth says - being reported fortnightly. However, the usefulness of this data is limited, given that all it provides is an isolated snapshot of a moment in time.
So, for example, on Wednesday 30 August attendance in Scottish schools was 92.7 per cent across all sectors; in primary it was 95.4 per cent and in secondary 89.4 per cent. There is no information on how this compares with previous years (presumably because before the pandemic data was not collected in this way) and although in the past figures on “cumulative pupil attendance” were reported, this measure has been scrapped in more recent iterations of these statistics.
How useful these updates are, therefore, is questionable - after all, if these statistics cannot be easily compared with previous years, how do we know if things are getting better or worse? And if all we get is snapshots on a particular day of the week, how do we know the cumulative impact - for example, what proportion of pupils is missing more than one-fifth of school?
What the English and the Welsh figures demonstrate is that overall attendance rates mask patterns that are well worth exploring if you really want to understand how much young people are attending school.
Scotland, therefore, needs to dig deeper and increase transparency - because the alternative is to remain in ignorance at the expense of pupils.
Emma Seith is senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith
