Nadhim Zahawi has said he wants work with Ofsted to raise attendance levels as new figures showed more than one in 10 pupils was out of school last week.

He told an event at the Conservative Party conference tonight that one of his first acts as education secretary was to ask his department to do “a deep dive into what’s happening with absenteeism”.

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Mr Zahawi said: “Some of it is Covid-related both in terms of a student may have Covid and is therefore self-isolating [and]...what I would describe as Covid anxiety - whether it be parental anxiety, students’ anxiety or whatever it happens to be - and some of it, which also worries me, is persistent absenteeism,” he said.

“So pre-Covid, we had attendance of about 95 per cent, now we’re down last week, slightly down again in the 80s this week.

“So what I want to do...is, with Ofsted, look at what themes have emerged from their inspections as to what good practice looks like. Why can some schools with very similar demographics get really high levels of attendance?”

Last month, Mr Zahawi said the government “won’t stand back and let attendance fall” after the first set of official figures for the new academic year showed that more than 100,000 children were out of school in England for Covid-19-related reasons in the middle of September.

Today it was revealed that more than 200,000 pupils were absent because of Covid last week, with more than 100,000 having tested positive for the virus and another 84,000 pupils with a suspected case.

Overall, some 89.5 per cent of students were in class on September 30, compared with 91.9 per cent on 16 September.

Mr Zahawi was speaking at a question and answer event organised by the Young Conservatives.

‘It is important that I protect education in the way we protected the NHS’

He said: “It’s important that I protect education in the way we protected the NHS” because of the impact it has on life chances.

He added: “What I’ve got to do now is make sure we keep schools open - 99 per cent of them are open.”

On exams next year, he said: “I think it was the right thing to do immediately before conference to give the certainty to this cohort that are going to do GCSEs and A levels about how they’re going to do exams, and work with Ofqual to make them fair, so we’re doing it in two steps back to pre-Covid grading.”

Mr Zahawi also said that, as education secretary, he would focus on early years and suggested that primary schools should welcome the “family” structure of multi-academy trusts.

“Early years - most of the gap is baked in at the age of five... and it’s very hard to close the gap in later years, so I would go to the early years. We need outstanding quality there and we need to look at how we deliver that.

“Primary as well - really important that we continue the same progress we’ve made on the academy journey so that primary schools continue to see the benefits of the multi-academy family of schools and how that has really begun to lift the standards of primary education as well as secondary education.”