Absence rates in schools last Thursday - which was sandwiched between two national teacher strike days - were not as high as might have been feared, a new analysis has shown.
Data from 10,000 schools shows a small increase in absence last Thursday compared with previous weeks of two percentage points at primary and three at secondary.
Last week saw a return to strike action as NEU teaching union members walked out on Wednesday and Friday in the ongoing dispute with the government over pay.
FFT Education Datalab has produced a new analysis examining the impact of the strikes on attendance in schools.
FTT’s Katie Beynon and Dave Thomson used data from 10,000 schools that use the FFT Attendance Tracker to assess the impact of the strikes.
Here are the key findings.
1. Absence on Thursday ‘not as bad as feared’
Comparing last Thursday with the previous three Thursdays, there was a small increase in absence - two percentage points at primary and three at secondary.
Compared with Thursday 29 June, when Eid was celebrated, absence was around four or five percentage points lower.
FFT said that absence on Thursday in the gap between two strike days was “perhaps slightly higher than we might have expected but not as bad as feared and not as high as the day of a major religious festival”.
2. 30 per cent of primary schools partially closed
Around 9 per cent of primary schools were fully closed, and a further 30 per cent were partially closed, according to the FFT data.
There were slightly more closures on Friday than Wednesday.
London had the highest rates of primary school closure, with just over 20 per cent of schools fully closed and 50 per cent partially.
The East Midlands had the lowest rates, with 2 per cent of schools fully closed on Wednesday and 4 per cent on Friday, and 16 per cent partially closed on Wednesday and 19 per cent on Friday.
3. Rates of school closure were higher in secondary
Rates of closure were much higher in secondary education, where around 25 per cent of schools were fully closed and a further 60 per cent partially closed.
As with primary, London had the most closures, with around 90 per cent either fully or partially closed.
4. Attendance higher than the first February strike day
On Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, around 94 per cent of primary and 90 per cent of secondary pupils attended school.
On strike days on Wednesday and Friday, around 65 per cent of primary and 27 per cent of secondary pupils attended - with attendance slightly lower on Friday than Wednesday.
This compares with 57 per cent of primary pupils and 23 per cent of secondary pupils present on the first single strike day on Wednesday 1 February.
5. Year 10 attendance markedly higher than younger secondary pupils
Looking at attendance on strike days by year group, FFT found little difference for primary-age pupils - all year groups had attendance of 66-69 per cent on Wednesday and 63-65 per cent on Friday.
At secondary, however, attendance among Year 10 pupils was around twice that of the next highest attending year group, Year 7, with Years 8 and 9 having the lowest attendance.
6. Increase in secondary pupils missing the entire week
One of the possible outcomes of staging strikes on two days in a week close to the summer holidays was an increase in pupils being off for the whole week. To investigate this, FFT plotted the percentage of pupils who missed the full week, alongside the same figure in recent weeks.
The proportion of primary pupils who missed every day last week is no higher than the proportion who missed a full week in any of the preceding four weeks. This is true both for disadvantaged and not disadvantaged pupils.
In secondary schools, the proportion of pupils missing the whole week increased by around a fifth compared with recent weeks.
For disadvantaged pupils, this was an increase of one percentage point, and for non-disadvantaged pupils an increase of 0.4 percentage points across the total number of pupils.
