Attendance – How is your school doing?

Improving attendance begins at board level and ‘Working together to improve school attendance guidance’ that applied to all schools from September 2022 made that clear.

Boards should take an active role in attendance improvement and a key part of this role is understanding absence in their own school. Boards will need to benchmark their attendance and absence rates both locally and nationally, the latest absence rates for schools have been published:

Academic year to date:
National:       Overall Absence 7.6% and Persistent Absence 23.4%

Devon:          Overall Absence 8.0% and Persistent Absence 23.0%

Academic year to date overall absence figures by phase:

National:       Primary: 6.2% and secondary 9.2%

Devon:          Primary: 6.0% and secondary 10.0%

Academic year to date persistent absence figures by phase:

National:       Primary 19.5% and secondary 27.8%

Devon:          Primary 18.0% and secondary 30%

The persistent absence rate nationally for the year to date is currently 23.4%. This is a fall from 25.1% in the Autumn term. The high persistent absence rates are driven by illness towards the end of the Autumn term as a a number of illnesses all peaked at around the same time in December.

Whilst persistent absence is higher than last year, there has been a sharp fall in pupils persistently not attending. This reflects that in Autumn 2020 and Autumn 2021, pupils were being recorded as not attending due to reasons related to coronavirus (e.g. where isolating). More information on national pupil attendance rates can be found here.

If you are a chair or vice-chair of a governing board, chair or vice-chairof an academy trust or chair or vice-chair of a local academy body/committee have you booked your place on the next Chairs Forum? The forum will be held virtually on Monday 6^th March at 6pm, will last for one hour and cover the important topic of attendance. Please email [email protected] for the Zoom link.