It is an “impossibility” for schools to provide the sorts of services that could help to tackle pupil absence without them being given the “tools” to do so, a headteachers’ leader has warned MPs.
Speaking to MPs today, Rob Williams, senior policy adviser at the NAHT school leaders’ union, said that policymakers needed to be “careful” about what they were asking of schools.
He was giving evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee as part of its inquiry into persistent absence.
Here are six key things that MPs on the committee were told:
1. Schools need the tools to be able to provide services that can tackle pupil absence
Mr Williams’ warning came in response to a question from Conservative MP Anna Firth, who asked whether a “cultural shift” was needed away from schools just being “a place of learning where people perhaps traditionally don’t always want to go”.
She asked if schools needed to become “places where children are engaged in other activities, hopefully at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day”.
Responding to this, Mr Williams referenced a school that he had been a senior leader at, which had provided wraparound services such as breakfast clubs, and said that this school “never really had an attendance issue”.
But he added: “I don’t know any head I’ve ever spoken to who is reluctant around doing this, but they need to be given the tools to do it.
“And that’s really, really critical, and it includes all those sort of support services. One thing we’ve seen is where capacity is lacking, what you find is the threshold for intervention gets so high - it’s too late. There’s not an early enough intervention,” he added.
“I think [schools] have to be given the tools to [offer these services], otherwise it’s an impossibility”.
2. Warning over ‘steady increase’ in severe absence
MPs on the committee were given several stark statistics on absence and attendance by those giving evidence.
Alice Wilcock, head of education at the Centre for Social Justice think tank, warned MPs that from 2013 onwards, there has been “a steady increase” in the number of children who are “severely absent” in schools - missing the majority of their sessions.
This figure rose from 20,000 in secondary schools in 2013, creeping to about 40,000 pre-pandemic, and is closer to 70,000 now, the session was told.
Ms Wilcock warned that pupils with “severe absence” were a “really important” category of children, and encouraged the committee to look at them specifically.
Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, warned that persistent absence was “one of the issues of our age”, and said analysis showed that 818,000 of the 1.6 million pupils that were persistently absent in the autumn term of 2021-22 were not absent due to illness.
She called the situation “very serious”.
3. Call to put ‘moral pressure’ on the travel industry over term-time holidays
Conservative MP Nick Fletcher questioned those attending the session about holiday prices during the school holidays.
Dame Rachel said: “If you’re from a family that doesn’t earn as much as other families, then if you take a holiday [during term time], you’re likely to get a fine from your school and it’s still worth it. If you come from a well-off family, you can do the trade-off and say, ‘My holiday’s £600 cheaper a day and I have to pay a fine of £200,’ so the trade-offs are worth it.
“I wish we could change the industry and I do think we should be putting some moral pressure on there. And maybe we ought to ask a cabinet member who’s passionately interested in it, like Mr Gove [Michael Gove, the levelling up, housing and communities secretary] to go to do that for us.”
Ms Wilcock added that in some instances, local authorities were receiving payments of fines in the post from parents before they were even officially asked to pay them, because they knew they would be saving money on the cost of the holiday.
4. Concerns over how schools apply the ‘B code’
There is inconsistency over how schools are applying the “B code” to record absent pupils, with some using it to avoid scrutiny of managed moves, MPs were told during the session.
Ms Wilcock and Dame Rachel both raised the use of the code as a cause for concern.
Dame Rachel said: “There are a lot of different codes used by schools around absence and I’m particularly concerned about the B code. And I just want to raise this with you.
“The B code is meant to be used for pupils who are present but at an off-site educational activity that’s been approved by the school.
“Now, this code is not meant to be used for kids who are at home ‘working’. It is meant to be used if they are in an alternative provision but still on the school rolls.
“I am seeing great inconsistency in the use of the code, and I think that is a simple place that we could look at.”
Dame Rachel said to MPs that we should look at B codes carefully because “this is where children who are severely absent - and who are part home-educated - start to slide off.”
5. School attendance going down on Fridays
Dame Rachel also told MPs that an analysis of attendance data - from both before and after Covid-19 - from a number of multi-academy trusts suggests that some pupils are now not going into school on Fridays, a trend that did not exist before the pandemic.
“We’re seeing a huge amount of Friday absence that wasn’t there before. Parents are at home on Fridays. We’ve had evidence from kids: ‘Well, you know, mum and dad are at home, stay at home.’”
She told MPs: “We need our children back to school and I just can’t urge everyone enough to be singing that from the rooftops.”
6. Managing attendance a ‘cross-sector challenge’
Mr Williams warned MPs that improving attendance was “a complex cross-sector challenge that schools cannot resolve by themselves”.
He added that it was important for there to be access to appropriate support services, such as child and adolescent mental health services, attendance teams and more.
Several attendees also highlighted the rise in mental health and anxiety problems among pupils post-pandemic.
Lucy Nethsingha, deputy chair of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People’s Board, said that those working with schools are “all very aware of the huge impact of the cost-of-living crisis on some of the families most under pressure”, and that this was “unlikely to be helping” with attendance problems this year.
