Ministers are set to create a new national system for when legal intervention and fines should be issued over pupil absence, despite major opposition to the plan from parents.
The government will also legislate to require schools to have an attendance policy and will bring academies in line with other state schools over the rules for when pupils can be granted absence.
It comes as the department published new data showing that pupils with better attendance had higher levels of attainment at both key stage 2 Sats and GCSEs in 2019.
A new national framework for issuing fixed penalty notices over pupil absence will now be created “at the earliest possible opportunity,” the DfE said.
When asked “Do you agree that a national framework for the use of attendance legal intervention, including a new regulatory framework for issuing fixed penalty notices for absence should be set?”, 44 per cent of respondents strongly disagreed and another 8 per cent somewhat disagreed.
However, the responses show a marked split in the views of parents and school staff responding.
The DfE found that 81 per cent of school or academy trust staff strongly or somewhat agreed with the plan while 75 per cent of parents strongly or somewhat disagreed.
The government is also pushing ahead with its other proposals for improving attendance.
These are:
Requiring schools to have an attendance policy, and to have regard to statutory guidance on the expectations of schools, academy trusts and governing bodies of maintained schools on attendance management and improvement.
Introducing guidance on the expectations of local authority attendance services.
Bringing the rules for granting leaves of absence in academies in line with other state-funded schools.
The government has also been carrying out a trial that will allow for attendance data to be collected centrally from schools’ electronic registers.
The DfE said most schools are already signed up to this scheme - which was first called for by children’s commissioner Rachel de Souza - but added that the education secretary intends to make it a statutory requirement for all schools to sign up to, if Parliament backs the plans.
Schools expected to produce attendance policies
The DfE has now published non-statutory guidance to schools, trusts and governing bodies of maintained schools, which includes an expectation that all schools develop and publish a school attendance policy.
All schools’ policies will be expected to cover attendance expectations, day-to-day attendance management processes, their strategy for using attendance data, their strategy for reducing persistent and severe absence, and the point at which sanctions will be used.
The government has said these expectations will apply on a non-statutory basis from the beginning of the next academic year in September “to give schools time to implement them before legislation requires it”.
Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi plans to legislate “at the earliest opportunity to introduce a new statutory duty to ensure such a policy is produced, published and regularly publicised”, but the DfE said this “will not come into force before September 2023”.
Council funding concerns
Concerns over funding levels in local authorities were raised during the consultation over the plan to create new expectations on council attendance services.
The DfE has said that it carried out an assessment that shows this can be achieved within existing council budgets.
However, it has also said that it will remove the current restriction on local authorities’ use of monies collected through penalty notices.
This will mean rather than being restricted to using the money to issue more penalty notices and prosecute for the original offence, the money can also be used for preventing the need for their use in the first place through better support to remove the underlying barriers to attendance.
Covid pandemic ‘can’t lower our ambitions’
In a foreword to the government’s response to its consultation, schools minister Robin Walker said that the government recognised the impact that the pandemic has had on children’s education but said it “should not be an excuse to lower ambitions”.
“The government is determined to address the wider underlying causes of children not being in school,” he added.
Mr Walker said that the government intended to help schools improve attendance by giving them access to best practices.
This will be done through new “off-the-shelf evidence-based interventions” developed by the Education Endowment Foundation, new voluntary standards for attendance professionals working with families, and a 21st-century national data collection to “better understand patterns of attendance in a timelier way”.
He added: “To help ensure no child falls through the cracks, we will increase the focus on pupils who are severely absent [missing 50 per cent or more of school], expecting schools, trusts, and local authorities to work together to reengage these pupils. We will also introduce legislation to create registers of children not in school in each local authority.”
