Schools must demonstrate they are moving towards pre-pandemic attendance levels, Ofsted has said.
In a new blog post on how it will assess the issue during inspections, the inspectorate says it is right to expect that schools should be doing all they can to achieve the highest possible attendance.
But the watchdog also acknowledges that not all factors are in schools’ control so there cannot be an arbitrary attendance percentage target that all schools need to reach.
Ofsted says that it will judge schools favourably if they are demonstrating they are doing all they can, even if their attendance numbers are lower than previously.
The blog adds: “Importantly, the school will need to demonstrate they are moving towards pre-pandemic levels of attendance or higher, even if they remain a distance away from their overall ambition.
“However, if a school is not doing all that can reasonably be expected, we may still have concerns.”
In the blog, Ofsted warns that persistent school absence is one of the most significant ongoing impacts of the Covid pandemic.
It highlights how the latest data shows that nearly one in four pupils were absent for 10 per cent of school sessions in autumn 2022, nearly double the position in 2019.
Ofsted points to a Department for Education attendance blog post, which says that the highest attendance rates are linked with the best outcomes at all key stages.
The inspectorate, which introduced a curriculum-focused inspection framework in September 2019, says that even missing small amounts of education can mean a child misses important sections of the curriculum and may therefore struggle to learn concepts that are built on what they missed.
Schools need to understand absence causes
In the blog, Ofsted says that schools need to understand the causes of absence and persistent absence in order to be able to improve it.
It adds that inspectors have found that, in some cases, the impact of the pandemic has led to parents’ heightened anxieties about children attending school when ill, and this is impacting pupils’ attendance, particularly in primary schools.
Ofsted highlights a letter sent to school leaders on mild illness and school attendance from leading medical professionals, including chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty.
It says: “It will usually be appropriate for parents and carers to send their children to school with mild respiratory illnesses…a minor cough, runny nose or sore throat, [but not] if they have a temperature of 38C or above.”
The watchdog says this message also needs to be reinforced, too, by the medical profession - especially GPs and pharmacies, which it says will help parents get the right perspective and balance, and avoid an overly risk-averse approach to keeping children out of school.
