The government must act to tackle persistent absence after the pandemic, the chair of the Commons Education Select Committee has warned today.
Commenting on the government’s response, published today, to the committee’s report on its education recovery plans following the Covid crisis, chair of the committee Robert Halfon said its failure to produce a plan to deal with persistent absence is now the “elephant in the room”.
Earlier this year, the Commons Education Select Committee - a cross-party group of MPs - launched a report that called the government’s catch-up plan a “spaghetti junction of funding”, and said it should give cash directly to schools.
The report also called on the Department for Education to take more steps to address the issue of persistent absence and ensure no more children become “ghost children”.
The report said the DfE should prove its multi-million pound National Tutoring Programme (NTP) was working, or else cancel its contract with the operator, Randstad.
The government has since ended its contract with the Dutch recruitment firm, and will instead direct all tutoring money to schools from the next academic year, which it points out in its response to the report.
But the report also raised concerns over persistent absence and said the DfE should “take steps” to address this and ensure no more pupils become “ghost children” - a term for pupils who almost entirely disappeared from education since schools returned after they were closed to most pupils during coronavirus lockdowns.
It added: ”The Department must urgently set out proactive measures, working with schools and local authorities, to get these pupils back into school.”
And it also said schools should hold mental health and wellbeing assessments for children.
In response to the report, the government said it was “in the process of reviewing the school attendance system as a whole” and noted that it had recently reaffirmed its commitment to create local authority registers for children not in school, and a duty on local authorities to provide support to home educators.
But Mr Halfon said the response did not fully address the committee’s warnings.
He welcomed the changes made to the NTP but added: “The elephant in the room remains. According to the children’s commissioner, over 124,000 ‘ghost children’ have still not returned to school.
“It is also particularly concerning that the Centre for Social Justice reported that, before March 2022, 13,000 pupils in exam-critical years were missing from the system, and the latest figures published by Education DataLab suggest that 5 per cent of pupils were severely absent from September to May of this year.
“We cannot risk these children becoming an ‘Oliver Twist’ generation, slipping through the cracks and lost to the system forever.”
He also said the plans for mental health and wellbeing assessments had essentially been rejected by the DfE’s response.
Earlier this year, the DfE announced plans to introduce new rules on school attendance and parental fines in a bid to reduce pupil absence.
Speaking about the plans at the time, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said they would “end the postcode lottery of how attendance is managed in different schools and parts of the country, and make sure every child and family get the best possible support to attend school as regularly as possible”.
