The children’s commissioner for England has called for “live data” on school attendance to be provided by the Department for Education to ensure that there is an overview of whether pupils are attending.
Dame Rachel de Souza made the recommendation to MPs today while giving evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee.
She also revealed that she had discussed her proposal with the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi.
Her comments came as the latest DfE Covid attendance figures were published today, showing that around 315,000 pupils were off school last week because of the virus.
And, overall, more than one in 10 pupils were absent last Thursday.
The children’s commissioner was responding to questions about pupils in children’s homes and was asked what more data she would like to see from the DfE.
Dame Rachel said: “We need the data that would show that every child is successful, whether that is attendance, academic progress…I would like those things to be seen.”
Covid: Proposal for up-to-date school attendance figures
She told MPs that she has been talking to the education secretary about obtaining live data from schools.
“I want to see live data. We need to see the attendance data now. It is only a limit of our current MIS [management information system] that we can’t look and see who is in school now,” she added.
“At the moment we can only see the percentage of kids who weren’t in school - we don’t know if they were the same ones as yesterday or today.
“I really want to see our data systems updated. Just those basic things would be of help.”
The DfE today published attendance figures for the final week of term - almost a month later.
The DfE’s latest attendance data includes Covid absence rates for both Thursday 6 January and Thursday 16 December, and reveals that cases increased both just before and just after the Christmas holidays.
The session in Parliament today also looked at ensuring that vulnerable children can access “good” or “outstanding”-rated schools.
Dame Rachel said: “LAC [looked-after children] should have priority to ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’ schools. They need a corporate parent to act like a pushy parent to get children into good schools.”
She said she was concerned about the lack of case planning for children in care.
“What you have got is struggles to place children in a home but not thinking about their education as well,” said Dame Rachel, “What we need to be doing is designing local flexible placements, building up foster activity and children’s homes activity with links to good schools and having the data to really have a sense of how many young people are coming into the system.”
Dame Rachel also said practical solutions were needed to help those children at risk of being targeted by gangs.
She said it could be as simple as having someone to take them to and from school.
