Secondary schools prioritised keeping classes open for students in Years 11 and 7 during last week’s teacher strike, according to analysis published today.
Using its Attendance Tracker, FFT Education Datalab has provided new insight into how the strike impacted on the number of pupils in school.
Its figures, published in a blog today, show clear differences in the proportion of pupils present in class between primary and secondary schools on Wednesday 1 February.
Last week’s strike was the first of seven strike days planned by the NEU in a dispute with the government over teacher pay.
Data from schools using FFT’s Attendance Tracker show that around 57 per cent of primary pupils were present last Wednesday, and there was little variation between year groups.
In secondary schools, however, the figure was much lower, with less than a quarter of pupils present in school (23 per cent) overall.
There was also much greater variation between year groups in secondary.
In Year 11, the majority of pupils (54 per cent) were present. The year group with the second highest attendance was Year 7, with 26 per cent of students in school.
The lowest attendance was in Year 9, with only 10 per cent of pupils marked as present.
For its analysis, FFT compared the number of pupils who were marked as present last Wednesday with the number for other Wednesdays so far this term.
Teacher strike day: differences in school attendance
The data also shows marked differences in attendance levels in schools between different regions of England.
London had the lowest attendance, with less than a third (30 per cent) of primary pupils and only 13 per cent of secondary students present at school.
The North West was the only other region where primary school attendance was below 50 per cent.
Primary attendance was highest in the Midlands - at 74 per cent in the East Midlands and 67 per cent in the West Midlands.
For secondary schools by region, the highest level of attendance was around a third of students in school.
Secondary attendance was highest in the North East (34 per cent), followed by the West Midlands, (32 per cent) and the East Midlands (29 per cent).
The analysis also shows that in all year groups, at both primary and secondary, “disadvantaged pupils were less likely to be marked present than their peers”.
Across primary year groups, this difference was around 5 percentage points. In Year 11, it was around 7 percentage points, the FFT blog, written by Katie Beynon and Dave Thomson, says.
They add: “Around 60 per cent of the difference in attendance between disadvantaged primary pupils on strike day and their peers can be explained by disadvantaged pupils being more likely to be on roll at schools with low attendance overall.”
However, the analysis says that this pattern did not occur in secondary schools.
The FFT Attendance Tracker contains data from around 7,700 primary and 2,700 secondary schools in England.
Data published by the Department for Education at the end of last week showed that 54 per cent of schools were restricting attendance as a result of teachers being on strike, with 9.3 per cent of those fully closed on the day.
Less than half (45.9 per cent) of schools across England were reported to be fully open.
The figures were based on returns from around 16,400 (77 per cent of) state schools in England that submitted attendance data to the DfE by 2pm on the day.
