Children Not in School: National Register and Support

Debate between Damian Hinds and Rushanara Ali

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

Of course, I readily acknowledge that cost of living pressures and inflationary pressures have been difficult for families in many ways. It is also true that the single most important thing to underpin family budgets is employment, and we are benefiting from the still very high rates of employment in this country. We are also benefiting from the proportion of people in work on low pay having come down significantly as a result of the national living wage. Yes, there is much more to do, but there is also a great deal happening. I should now make some progress.

To go back to the children not on school registers, the Government continue to work with local authorities to improve non-statutory registers. I have already mentioned the consultation on revised guidance for elective home education. Through termly data collection, we are also increasing the accuracy of registers, improving the understanding of this cohort of children. However, true accuracy can only be gained with mandatory registers, stipulating the data to be recorded and an accompanying duty on parents to inform local authorities when they are home educating.

We often say that reading is the most fundamental thing in education, because if someone cannot read they cannot access the curriculum, and then nothing else in school really works. However, there is one thing that is even more fundamental than reading, and that is attendance, because whatever great things our schoolteachers do, they can only benefit the children who are there to benefit from them.

I am pleased that we have started to see some progress in this area. There were 380,000 fewer pupils persistently absent or not attending in 2022-23 than the previous year. I am not quite sure how the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South does the extrapolation to her figure of one in four—[Interruption.] Well, that is not what the data series says. On Thursday, we will see the first data published for persistent absence in this academic year. We shall see what that says, but I hope it will show some further improvement. In any event, we certainly know that there is further to go.

Our comprehensive attendance strategy includes a number of different elements. There are clearer expectations of the whole system, including requiring schools to have an attendance policy and to appoint an attendance champion, and for local authorities and schools to agree individual plans for at-risk children. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) will be leading a debate in Westminster Hall very soon in connection with and in support of her presentation Bill on making such obligations statutory.

On data, which the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South spoke about, our attendance data tool now provides near real-time information, not once a year, to allow earlier intervention and avoid absence becoming entrenched. We already have 88% of schools taking part in our world-leading daily registers data pilot, and we want that to be 100% by September.

[Rushanara Ali]

Will the Minister give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I ask the hon. Member to forgive me, in the interests of time.

We have targeted support in which schools with strong attendance performance support others that need help, and we are expanding that so that almost 2,000 schools will benefit. Our mentoring pilot, which I think the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South inadvertently referred to, is delivering one-to-one support for persistently and severely absent children. That is currently taking place in Middlesbrough, Knowsley, Doncaster, Stoke and Salford, and it will be extended to 10 new areas, with a total of 10,000 children, later this year.

System leadership is incredibly important. That is why we have the attendance action alliance, which brings together leaders not only from the world of education, but from children’s social care, health and allied services. They are all working together to address the wider barriers to and enablers of attendance.

As I said earlier, we must be very clear that some children do need to be off school some of the time. That has always been the case, but there has been some change in attitude since covid, with a greater propensity to keep a child at home with minor illness, such as a cough or cold in some cases. We need to recalibrate at least back to where we were pre-covid. That is why we have launched the national campaign “Moments Matter, Attendance Accounts” to re-emphasise the importance of every day in school, not only for learning but for wellbeing, experiences and friendships.

Alongside this, we have made attendance a key theme of school and children’s services reforms. We have provided additional funding for recovery, including for tutoring and direct funding for schools. To help families, we have committed an additional sum of £200 million to scale-up the Supporting Families programme, which of course has a specific requirement on school attendance. We are also spending on the national school breakfast programme to provide around 350,000 breakfasts on a school day in over 2,500 schools, targeted at the most disadvantaged areas. I also say to the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South that we should look at targeting secondary schools as well as primary schools, because persistent absence can of course be particularly concentrated in the secondary age group.

There are now considerably more children in receipt of free school meals than the last time a Labour Government were in office. This is despite the fact—[Interruption.] This is despite the fact, I say to the hon. Lady, that there are 600,000 fewer children living in workless households and that, thanks to the national living wage, the proportion of people in work but in low pay has halved.

Mental health barriers are also a very important part of this. That is why we are working with NHS England to increase the number of mental health support teams. They already cover 47% of pupils in secondary schools, and that will increase to at least 50% across all phases by March next year.

I am pleased to report that the latest data shows that, while there is still a lot to do, there is some cause for cautious optimism. Overall attendance last term was 93.2%, up from 92.5% in autumn 2022-23, meaning that pupils in England on average attend the equivalent of around a day and a half more across an academic year than they did the previous year. So while there is still a long way to go, this does represent progress.

To conclude, for the vast majority of children school of course continues to be the best place for their education, and it has never been more important to be at school. England’s primary school children are now the best readers in the western world, and at secondary we have made considerable progress.

The hon. Lady said some interesting things about PISA, the main international study of attainment—not the only one, but the main one—in which England has moved up the rankings, having previously come down the rankings before 2010. The hon. Lady says that in the end it is the score, not the rankings, that matter, and she is of course right. I am surprised she does not know this, however: she said education has not been badly affected by covid in every country, but I have to tell her that covid has given a real knock to education across most of the world. [Interruption.] I beg the hon. Lady’s pardon? [Interruption.] It has taken a great knock across much of the world and much of the world is now engaged in recovery programmes to make up that ground. But what the PISA results showed is that the knock sustained in this country was less than in very many other countries.

The PISA results also highlighted something else about education in England. It identifies this country as being in the relatively small set of what it calls “equitable systems.” In other words, as well as having strong performance relative to other countries, that performance is well spread out.

There have always been some children who are educated at home, and I repeat my earlier tribute to parents who, in so many cases, give up so much to do this and do it so well. However, covid created a big increase on top of what was already growth in the numbers, and it is important that we understand that.

The wider issue is that the legacy of the pandemic has also meant that school absence levels are too high. We remain committed to working with pupils, parents, teachers, local authorities, the health service and other partners to tackle these issues through our support-first approach, building on the strengths of the current system and the success achieved by teachers and leaders in our schools prior to the pandemic. Being in school has never been more valuable for pupils, with standards continuing to rise. I am hugely grateful to all our brilliant teachers, heads, partners throughout the system and everyone who has worked to create the progress achieved so far, and I am confident there is a great deal more to come.