The government should provide clearer guidance over back-dating of pupil removals from a register when persistently absent pupils stop attending school, a multi-academy trust (MAT) leader has warned.
The move is needed to clear up “unnecessary confusion” that has led to different practices across trusts and local authorities, Tomas Thurogood-Hyde, assistant CEO of Astrea Academy Trust, has warned.
The Confederation of School Trusts (CST) has also said a “complex debate” is needed over the fairness of the current system on trusts that might have higher absence rates due to being in “high mobility areas”.
In its accounts for 2021-22 and 2022-23, Astrea Academy Trust acknowledged that lower-than-average attendance has been a legacy challenge for the trust, but added that some schools may not be collecting absence data in the same way.
In its accounts, the trust said it “operates according to legal advice which prohibits the back-dating of removals from a school’s register after a child has ceased to attend”.
It adds that “this practice is not observed by all local authorities and all other schools, meaning that Astrea schools carry a higher proportion of leavers’ absence data”.
Thurogood-Hyde said: “Any variation in practice inevitably causes unnecessary confusion and the next update to the Department for Education’s attendance guidance should take the opportunity to make the position on back-dating clear.”
Secondary attendance at Astrea was 88.46 per cent in 2022-23, against a national average of 90.7 per cent. Primary attendance was 92.02 per cent against an average of 94 per cent.
For the previous year, secondary attendance was 86.2 per cent and primary was similar at 92 per cent.
Interpreting the regulations
Education law firm Stone King has said that schools would often like to back-date removals to their register when a child stops attending due to the impact on their persistent absence figures, but the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 do not permit this.
Education lawyer and partner at Simpson Millar, Dan Rosenberg, explained that schools can only remove pupils from the register for reasons set out in the current regulations.
He said: ”When a school deletes a pupil from the register, the local authority has to be notified - when the local authority is notified [then that] is the date the pupil should be taken off the register.
“Say a child is not coming into school for a long period of time while the local authority or mental health professionals try to assist them - if they remain on the school roll, their absence needs to be appropriately recorded each day as it occurs.
“It may be that eventually an alternative solution is found, and that child starts at another school - when that happens that would be the date they would be removed from the roll.
“If they had remained on the roll until then, the school could not retrospectively change the register to delete them from the register from the date that they last physically attended the school.”
‘Guidance is not as explicit as it might be’
Guidance from the DfE on improving attendance provides schools with information on how to interpret the regulations, though no specific reference to back-dating is made.
Samira Sadeghi, director of trust governance at CST, said: “The DfE’s attendance guidance is not as explicit as it might be on this, so practices vary. There is a complex debate to be had about how fairly the arrangements impact on persistent absence figures, particularly for schools in high-mobility areas.”
The government has been focusing on improving attendance as persistent absence rates have remained high after the pandemic.
A total of 138,905 pupils were classed as “severely” absent across the 2022-23 autumn and spring terms - more than a quarter higher (26 per cent) than the numbers seen in the previous academic year (110,470), and much higher than the 57,167 similar absences recorded before the pandemic in 2018-19.
Disadvantaged pupils generally have higher absence rates. In the latest data available, the overall absence rate for disadvantaged pupils was 10.4 per cent last term, almost double the 5.5 per cent recorded for their peers.
Astrea operates 26 academies, many of which have an above-average proportion of pupils receiving free school meals as high as 70 per cent.
Attendance action alliance
The DfE has set up the Attendance Action Alliance with the aim of raising attendance as well as attendance hubs and mentor schemes.
Warren Carratt, Attendance Action Alliance member and Nexus CEO, told Tes that further developing the statutory guidance would help provide greater clarity on how to code absence.
He said: “Having a more mature and analytical data set for coding pupil absence will help reduce the risk of attendance being a binary issue, and creates legitimacy in coding for those schools who are seeking to support pupils with complex, multi-systemic needs, without this being seen as a failing in the school or the child.”
The DfE was contacted for comment.
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