Schools: Mental Health and Poor Attendance

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right that, where special educational needs come alongside mental health problems and other issues in children’s lives, they are more likely to be absent from school. Of course, while they are absent from school, they are not learning and it is also likely that mental health issues will increase, not reduce. That is why, for the vast majority of children with special educational needs who are being educated in mainstream schools, early intervention through the use of access to mental health support workers will be an important first way to support them and prevent conditions from becoming worse.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, improving attendance is the most urgent and important priority to support our children’s well-being and their academic attainment. There is rightly a focus on the most vulnerable children who are severely absent from school, including those with mental health issues. They represent about 2% of school-age children, but there is a much larger group—about 37% of our children last year, or 2.7 million pupils—who miss between 5% and 15% of school, with all the impact that has on behaviour and attendance, and the pressure it puts on teachers. What are the Government planning to do to help schools to improve the attendance of those children?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness has done considerable work in this area, as I was reminded while being briefed for this Question. In particular, the whole range of work outlined in the updated Working Together to Improve School Attendance guidance, which of course becomes statutory in August, is important in outlining the responsibility of schools to develop a policy and the support that needs to be available to children and young people to enable them to attend. She worked carefully on improving access to data, so that schools can have a more granular approach to the reasons why individual children or cohorts of children may be missing from school, and can put tailored interventions in to support them. She will know that 93% of schools already provide that data to the department, and from September that will be compulsory for all schools.