Every state school will be required to share daily attendance registers with the Department for Education, councils and trusts, under guidance set to become statutory in August, the government has announced.
A national framework governing parent fines for unauthorised absences will also come into force later this year, the DfE said today.
It said that the new framework will mean parental fines must be considered if a child misses five days of school for unauthorised absence.
Meanwhile, costs for fines will rise from £60 to £80 if paid within 21 days and from £120 to £160 if paid in 28 days, the department said.
In January, the DfE said that it was “committed to further legislation in the coming months” to require all schools to share their daily school registers with local and central government.
It added that 88 per cent of schools are sharing daily attendance data regularly with the DfE voluntarily via a portal set up in 2022.
Schools cannot retrospectively remove pupils from attendance registers
Schools have been warned by the DfE in the new statutory guidance that they cannot retrospectively delete a pupil’s name from registers, following calls from the sector for clarity on this.
Tes reported last month that Astrea Academy Trust had warned that some schools and local authorities were backdating removals from a school’s register.
The statutory guidance, published today, says that a “school cannot retrospectively delete a pupil’s name from the admission register or attendance register”. It adds that a pupil’s attendance must be recorded up until the date that the pupil’s name is deleted from the admission register.
The updated guidance also provides schools with more details on what is expected from them when they record a pupil as being off-site doing an educational activity using Code B.
Tes revealed last year that the DfE had concerns about how this code was being used by schools.
The statutory guidance says that schools need to ensure the off-site activity is supervised by a person it considers to have “the appropriate skills, training, experience and knowledge to ensure that the activity takes place safely and fulfils the educational purpose for which the pupil’s attendance has been approved”.
The guidance also states that pupils should not be granted absence in order to take part in protests during school hours.
Tarn becomes attendance ambassador
The DfE has also today named Rob Tarn as its new national attendance ambassador.
Mr Tarn, CEO of Northern Education Trust - a 24-school multi-academy trust based in the North of England - founded the country’s first attendance hub, which led to a DfE rollout to schools nationally.
Attendance hubs are made up of a lead school that shares its approaches to attendance with a network of schools that have similar cohorts and challenges.
Mr Tarn’s appointment comes after the government launched a new attendance campaign in January and said it would roll out 18 more school attendance hubs, plus a £15 million expansion of its mentor programme for persistently absent pupils.
Mr Tarn said that attendance is ”one of the biggest challenges facing the school system today”, and he was “pleased that the department has announced this package of important measures, including making the attendance guidance statutory”.
He said he was looking forward to working with attendance hub schools around the country “to share effective practice and support school leaders to improve attendance locally and nationally”.
Education is fourth ‘unofficial’ emergency service
Commenting on the government announcement that school absence fines will go up from £60 to £80, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that it was ”not unreasonable to increase the level of fines for unauthorised absence given that they have been fixed at £60 for several years”.
However, Mr Barton added that it was “important to understand that these fines predominately relate to pupils who are taken out of school for term-time holidays”.
He said: “While nobody wants to be in a position of fining parents, there simply has to be a marker that this is not acceptable.
“Not only does it affect the child’s education but it means teachers then have to spend time helping children to catch up with lost learning. If everybody did this it would be chaos.”
Mr Barton said that there was also a ”wider issue about absence relating to the growing number of children who suffer from anxiety and other mental health issues, families who are struggling to cope and disengagement with education”.
He added: “Schools need more help from the government in this work both in terms of the funding they receive and investment in local social care, attendance and mental health services.
“Education has become an unofficial fourth emergency service picking up the pieces for a decade-long erosion of support services. This cannot go on.”
Focus on fines
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said that a consistent national framework for fines “makes sense”, given the current “significant variation” between local authorities.
But he added that parents “will likely be surprised” at the government focus on fines “at a time when schools are struggling to find enough teachers to teach classes, when buildings are crumbling and when we are in the middle of a crisis in special needs provision”.
“Good attendance is obviously critically important, but fines have long proven to be too blunt a tool and largely ineffective at improving persistent absence,” Mr Whiteman added.
“In order to tackle poor attendance, the government needs to find out the reasons behind absence, and provide support for vulnerable families and for children’s and young people’s mental health,” Mr Whiteman said, adding that “without that work, higher fines could just be further punishing already struggling families and children”.
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