The government is to roll out 18 more school attendance hubs and a £15-million expansion of its mentor programme for persistently absent children in a bid to fix stubbornly high pupil absence rates.
The expansion will bring the total number of attendance hubs to 32, supporting 1,000 more schools, while 10 new mentor programmes will launch in September 2024, the Department for Education announced today.
A new government marketing campaign will also kick off today, which will be aimed at parents and focus on the “importance of attendance”.
Confederation of School Trusts (CST) chief executive Leora Cruddas told Tes that, while she backs the measures announced today, they will not be enough to fix the crisis, adding a “much more systemic” and cross-governmental approach is needed.
The additional hubs are set to launch across six regions later in the spring term, and will mean more than 1 million pupils across nearly 2,000 schools will be supported to improve attendance, the DfE said.
Concern over absence has spiralled since the pandemic and the number of pupils classed as persistent or severely absent has remained stubbornly high, despite previous government efforts to tackle the issue.
A total of 138,905 pupils were classed as “severely” absent in the 2022-23 autumn and spring terms combined - 26 per cent higher than the levels seen in the previous academic year (110,470), and well over double the numbers seen before the pandemic in 2018-19 (57,167).
Tackling the school attendance crisis
Asked if the expansion to the attendance programmes announced by the government today would be enough to tackle the attendance crisis, Ms Cruddas said: “I think, honestly, no.”
She said that the problems the country is facing with school attendance are much more complex than before the pandemic, owing to a rise in mental ill health, a breakdown in support services, and the number of young people now living in poverty or destitution.
“These complex social factors mean we need a much more systemic response. And what we certainly need is a cross-government strategy and a cross-government commitment to child poverty reduction, and we don’t yet have that,” she added.
“Increasingly, our schools are taking on responsibilities that would have been the remit of other types of services,” she said. “And those services are either very scaled back or don’t exist anymore. That puts significant pressure on school budgets, on top of other existing funding pressures on school budgets.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said the government was right to prioritise tackling this issue.
He added: “While there is nothing wrong with the expansion of attendance hubs, schools need more than advice. Over the last decade, we have seen the crucial support services that used to step in and tackle persistent absence eroded and it is immensely frustrating that the government is only now slowly beginning to realise the impact that has had.
“What we need to see is a much stronger commitment to restoring those services so that every family and child that needs support gets it quickly. This cannot be done on the cheap.”
Parents’ view on school attendance
Today’s announcement comes after a YouGov survey for the Centre for Social Justice think tank of just over 1,200 parents of school-age pupils found that almost one in three believe the Covid-19 pandemic has shown it is not essential for children to attend school every day.
The poll found that only 70 per cent of parents are confident their child’s needs are being met in school - a figure that drops to 61 per cent for parents with students at secondary school.
Tes revealed last year that multi-academy trusts were being lined up to establish attendance hubs after education secretary Gillian Keegan urged sector leaders to get involved.
The roll-out of the programme followed a pilot project run by Northern Education Trust, which involved around 60 schools working together to tackle absence.
Meanwhile, the expansion of the mentoring programme builds on a three-year intensive mentoring scheme already underway. It offers one-to-one support to persistently absent children and their families and is run by children’s charity Barnardo’s in five Priority Education Investment Areas (PEIAs).
The roll-out comes after the DfE published a contract notice last November, which said it was considering a £15 million expansion. It has not yet announced who will be overseeing the new mentors.
Sharing of school-level attendance data
The DfE also said today that it is still “committed to further legislation in the coming months” to require all schools to share their daily school registers with local and central government.
It said the move would ensure all state-funded schools, trusts and local authorities can record, view and share near real-time data on pupils’ attendance to facilitate more timely and targeted interventions for pupils who are displaying worrying patterns of absence.
Around 88 per cent of schools are sharing daily attendance data regularly with the DfE voluntarily via a portal set up in 2022, the DfE said.
However, the legislation, which was first announced in the 2022 Schools White Paper, was not mentioned in the King’s speech in November, which sets out the government’s planned legislation for the current Parliament.
Education secretary Gillian Keegan said that tackling school attendance is her “number one priority”.
“We want all our children to have the best start in life because we know that attending school is vital to a child’s wellbeing, development and attainment, as well as [their] future career success,” she said.
‘Staggering’ number of pupils missing school
Meanwhile, the shadow education secretary has described the number of pupils regularly missing school as “staggering”.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show yesterday, ahead of giving a major policy speech on Tuesday, Bridget Phillipson said that absence was not just damaging to an individual pupil’s life chances, but also to “all children within the school community”.
She said that her message to parents was that while it “can be tough”, it is “really important children are in school”.
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