Labour is aiming to bring forward legislation to create a new statutory register of children not in school.
An Opposition Day debate motion is planned today to allow the party to introduce a Children Not in School (National Register) Bill.
If passed, it would create a council-maintained register of children not on school rolls - something the current government has previously committed to undertake.
The announcement comes as Labour published new analysis suggesting that more than one in three GCSE students have missed nearly three months of secondary school since the pandemic.
Proposals to legislate for a children-not-in-school register were part of the government’s Schools Bill before it was dropped at the end of 2022.
Although ministers have insisted that the government remains committed to creating the register, no plans for this were included in the King’s speech last year.
Robin Walker, chair of the Commons Education Committee and a former schools minister, has previously urged the government to back a private members’ bill, introduced by Conservative MP Flick Drummond, which aimed to introduce the register.
Labour has also published analysis today of the persistent absence rate for Year 11 pupils in the autumn and spring term of 2023-24, and for the same cohort in its three previous academic years.
The party has suggested that persistently absent exam students have cumulatively missed 11,953,075 days across the four years of secondary school from Year 8 to Year 11.
Labour has also highlighted figures published in November last year, by the children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza, which showed that only 5 per cent of children who were severely absent in both Years 10 and 11 - and just 36 per cent who were persistently absent - achieved at least five GCSEs, including English and maths, in 2022.
Attendance is recorded in half-day sessions. A pupil is classed as being persistently absent if they miss more than one in ten of their sessions and severely absent if they miss more than half of them.
Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s shadow education secretary, said that Conservative MPs claim to support the register of children not in school, “but yet again have failed to deliver”.
She said: “There is no time to waste if we are to tackle the biggest challenge currently facing our schools. That is why Labour’s motion is so essential and represents the first step of our long-term plan to get to grips with persistent absence.”
A not-in-school register would not record pupils who are regularly or severely absent from school but rather would allow local and national governments to see how many children are not placed in a school. These could be children who are missing from education, being electively home educated or taught in unregistered alternative provision.
Earlier this month, the government and Labour announced plans to tackle the ongoing absence crisis.
The government announced an expansion of its attendance hub and mentor schemes, alongside a new campaign aimed at emphasising the importance of regular attendance to parents.
Labour has said it would use artificial intelligence to spot trends in absence.
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).
