Schools should ensure they have a “strong” Friday curriculum and extracurricular offer to help reduce absence, a Department for Education (DfE) minister has said, following the government’s latest attendance drive.
Baroness Barran, the school system minister, has highlighted the need for schools to focus on improving the attendance of pupils who are missing between five and 15 per cent of their sessions as well as those who are severely absent.
When challenged by a headteacher on social media about how schools can achieve this, she said: “Schools with big improvements in this area have an emphasis on positive reinforcement”, and suggested they could call a pupil’s home to say how great it was to see them in school.
Writing on X, she added that schools should ensure that Friday’s curricular and extracurricular offers are especially strong.
Last week, the education secretary Gillian Keegan suggested that parents working from home could be driving an increase in absences from school on Fridays.
Speaking to The Times, she said: “There are regularly 50,000 more pupil absences on Fridays compared with Mondays, which could be linked with many parents working from home.”
Baroness Barran’s comments came after the DfE launched a new attendance data tool for schools.
She said: “You should now be able to see your data at a class and pupil level. We hope that it takes the challenge to a more granular level. For example, what can we do about the eg, 15 pupils in Year 7 who have missed 11 to 15 per cent of school?”
The minister said that focusing on severe absence is important, but that those pupils are still “a relatively small group”.
She added: “The point with the 5 to 15 per cent, is if a pupil can come in nine days out of 10, what can the school do to make it 10/10?”
Boosting attendance for those in this absence bracket also has a “positive impact on those pupils who already have very high attendance”, Baroness Barran continued.
This is through “less disruption, better behaviour and less pressure on teachers to juggle the catch-up for pupils who have missed different lessons”.
Her comments come after the schools minister Damian Hinds told Tes that faster progress is needed to improve pupil attendance.
Baroness Barran has previously urged caution around “sweeping generalisations” about school attendance, instead suggesting there were “green shoots” in certain year groups, such as children going from primary to secondary.
As it launched its data tool on Friday, the DfE said it had identified a series of key attendance trends from the latest figures for schools to focus on.
1. Focus on pupils with 5 to 15 per cent absence
The DfE said schools should focus on pupils missing between 5 and 15 per cent of their lessons, and urged leaders to benchmark performance against local and national data to make “strategic decisions” and “be laser-focused in their response”.
The department said that absence in this group is “often linked to in-school barriers”, whereas those with severe absence tend to have “more out-of-school drivers”.
2. Support for KS3 ‘second transition’
In Year 8, the proportion of pupils attending every day was 7.4 percentage points lower than in Year 7, according to government data.
This is in comparison to the difference between Year 6 and Year 7, which was just 3 percentage points.
The “second transition” period between Year 7 and Year 8 was identified as an “emerging challenge” earlier this year, particularly for disadvantaged pupils or those with special educational needs and disabilities.
Speaking to Tes, Mr Hinds warned that the Year 7 to Year 8 attendance dip is “probably less well understood across society”.
The latest data shows that “focus needs to be continued past the first year of secondary school to support attendance as pupils progress through the years”, the DfE said.
3. FSM pupils need ‘targeted’ support
Pupils who have free school meals (FSM) have seen the highest increase in absence since the pandemic, with an average persistent absence rate (proportion of pupils with more than 10 per cent absence) of 36.5 per cent.
The government has identified FSM pupils as a pupil cohort needing targeted support owing to their low attendance figures.
The DfE added that FSM pupils are the lowest proportion of pupils attending 95 per cent or more of their sessions, with 35.3 per cent of pupils achieving this in 2022-23 compared with 51.3 per cent for all pupils.
Earlier this year, the DfE rolled 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.
4. Continued focus on severe absence
DfE data shows that two per cent of children are severely absent - missing more than half of the time they should be at school - with rates increasing with age.
The government has said that severe absence remains “too high” and is an area being addressed through wider initiatives of support.
It added that barriers to attendance are “often complex” and need a “multi-agency approach”, where schools work closely with local authorities and wider services.
5. Concern over slow attendance increase at KS4
Although pupils in Years 9, 10 and 11 saw increases in the proportion of pupils attending every day, they are improving at a slower rate than pupils in primary school, the DfE has said.
The figures come after Tes revealed that more than one in four senior leaders say they are more concerned about high absence among Year 11 students than last year.
The DfE said that key stage four has the lowest proportion of pupils attending 95 per cent or more in absolute terms, at about 43 per cent.
6. Focus on Year 11 girls’ attendance
Year 11 girls were shown as the cohort with the lowest proportion of pupils attending 95 per cent of the time or more (40.4 per cent) - this is lower than Year 11 boys, at 45 per cent, and lower than girls across all year groups, at 51.3 per cent.
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