School Attendance (Duties of Local Authorities and Proprietors of Schools) Bill

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Public Bill Committees

To conclude, I thank Members for attending and for their contributions, which highlighted the issues and concerns we all share about school attendance. We can all agree that tinkering around the edges will not do; to ensure that the Bill has the greatest impact, we need to see action from the Government so that we do not see a whole generation missing from Britain’s schools. With that, I welcome and commend the work of the right hon. Member for Chelmsford in highlighting the issue, bringing the Bill forward and lobbying so hard for the changes that schools and families are crying out for. I look forward to seeing the Bill pass through its remaining stages in the coming weeks and months.

[The Minister for Schools (Damian Hinds)]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Vickers. I want to join colleagues in congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford on introducing the Bill and her work in getting it to this stage. She brought to the process not only her commitment and passion but a number of unique insights. It was a pleasure to join her in visiting The Boswells School when I came to Chelmsford, and it has been a pleasure working with her on the Bill. This topic is clearly of the highest importance to her, as I know it is to Members of this Committee and to the Government.

It was clear on Second Reading that right across the House there is a shared recognition of the value of regular school attendance for attainment, wellbeing and development. Put simply, none of the other brilliant parts of school—whether that is phonics, maths mastery, two hours a week of sport, being with friends or taking part in the school play—can have a benefit if children are not there for them. This issue is of highest priority for us. I am pleased to see that the cross-House support continues to hold through Committee stage. I feel very confident in recommending the Bill to pass through its remaining stages. I take the opportunity to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley for her work in bringing forward the Children Not in School (Registers, Support and Orders) Bill, which is due for Committee stage in the coming weeks and which the Government also support.

The pandemic was one of the biggest challenges ever posed to the education system, both here and around the world. Among its knock-on effects is this unprecedented impact on absence.

Before the pandemic we had had long success in bringing down absence. It had been 6% at the time of the change in Government back in 2010, and it came down to 4.7% just before covid. Persistent absence came down from 16.3% to between 10% and 11% in the second half of the decade, until the onset of covid. Our goal is to build on the strengths of the existing system to improve attendance levels as quickly as possible back to pre-pandemic levels, and indeed better.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford reminded us, this issue is affecting different jurisdictions and education systems right around the western world from Norway to New Zealand. In England, it is one of our top priorities, and I am pleased to be able to say that we are seeing a difference. Thanks to the brilliant efforts of our school leaders, teachers and other members of staff, 440,000 fewer pupils were persistently absent or not attending in the past academic year than in the previous one. We welcome that improvement, but there is still clearly further to go to get to pre-pandemic levels, and indeed to improve further on them. There are still parts of the country where families do not yet have access to the right support. As my right hon. Friend outlined, the Bill will improve the consistency of support available in all parts of England, giving parents increased clarity, and levelling up standards across all 24,000 schools and 153 local authorities. Ultimately, this is about their 9 million pupils.

The Bill contains two main clauses: the first will impose a general duty on local authorities to exercise their functions with a view to promoting attendance and reducing absence in their areas, and the second will require schools of all types to have and to publicise a school attendance policy.

[Mr Robin Walker]

Ministers have to think carefully about imposing new duties on schools, but is not the reality that the vast majority of schools already have an attendance policy? Schools publicising it, however—sharing it and making it public—will be useful in encouraging dialogue with parents, local authorities and all the other organisations that come forward. What the Bill does in calling for publicity for the attendance policies is vital.

[Damian Hinds]

All that my hon. Friend says is correct. All schools have some form of attendance policy. There is some variation, and one of the things that is happening through this process—the Bill, and our wider work with behaviour hubs and champions, and so on—is to spread best practice. There is real interest from schools in doing so, because they see some of the variation in attendance rates and want to be able to do everything possible. Publicising is part of that. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford said, when going into a secondary school, for example, families will know what the policy is, which itself can be a help in upholding those attendance policies.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)]

The Bill is great, and I thank my right hon. Friend for it. Is there any evidence that breakfast clubs in primary schools increase attendance? I am slightly confused: if people do not send their children to school, will breakfast clubs make them get up to take their young children to school earlier?

[Damian Hinds]

I think there is. There is some evidence that facilitating things for parents can be helpful, particularly when such things allow parents to go to work and so on. Where I might disagree with the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North is that that is not unique to primary schools; in fact, attendance is more of a problem at secondary school than it is at primary school. We spend quite a lot of money at the moment on supporting breakfast clubs in a targeted way—where they are most needed, where they can make the most difference—and a blanket approach to primary schools would not achieve that. We think it is right to target the money and to take a precise approach, recognising that absence is more of an issue in secondary schools. Through breakfast clubs and other things one might do, one can have more of an impact.

Both clauses will require all schools and local authorities to have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State in relation to school attendance when complying with their duties under the Bill. That guidance, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford said, is the piece entitled, “Working together to improve school attendance”. It is widely supported by schools, trusts and local authorities, and both the Select Committee—I am pleased to welcome its Chair here today—and the Children’s Commissioner for England have previously called for it to be made statutory.

The guidance, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford said, was published in May 2022 to allow schools and local authorities time to implement the expectations. As I said earlier, we have already started seeing an improvement in attendance rates since then. To support the sector in delivering those expectations we have implemented a comprehensive attendance strategy; colleagues will be familiar with important aspects of that. We will of course continue to provide support.

To give an outline of that package, we have offered expert attendance advice support to every local authority in the country and to a number of trusts. We have set up attendance hubs, where lead schools offer support to others to improve their attendance practice—now reaching around 2,000 schools, responsible for 1 million pupils. We have created a new attendance data tool to help identify children at risk of persistent absence and enable early intervention. We convened the attendance action alliance at a national level to bring together system leaders from every part of our society, the public sector and parts of the charitable sector that can have an effect on this important issue. We are piloting attendance mentors who offer one-to-one targeted support to persistently absent pupils; we have recently appointed Mr Rob Tarn to the role of national attendance ambassador; and we have laid regulations that will, from the summer, modernise school registers and introduce a national framework for penalty notices.

I want to respond briefly to points made by colleagues. I say gently to the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North that I do not think she really wants to bring politics into this. The truth is that these issues are affecting countries right around the world. They are also affecting the home nations—the constituent countries of the United Kingdom. In Wales a different political party is in government and absence rates in Wales are worse than they are in England, but I recognise that, overall, we share the same ambitions.

The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North asked about the support available to families. She is quite right to identify the importance of things like mental health support. That is why we have offered the training grant to all state-funded schools; I think 15,000 have now taken up that offer to have a senior mental health lead trained. It is also why we are rolling out mental health support teams across the country. We anticipate getting to 50% of pupils being covered by that by the end of this financial year. Already there is greater prevalence in secondary schools than primary schools. We are also supporting the national school breakfast club programme because of the effects it can have.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury made some very important points. First, I join him in paying tribute to the work of the teachers at the school that he mentioned. I have been blown away when visiting other schools around the country. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford and I have of course had our own visits, and have had the opportunity to see some of the amazingly dedicated work and the lengths that schools and individual members of staff will go to, to try and ensure that every child has the opportunity of a first-class education.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury is right: it is parents’ responsibility to have children go to school. We have also been communicating with parents directly —I think that is important—making sure, for example, that people know about the NHS guidance on when it is necessary to keep a child off school and when it is not. I have already mentioned our support for breakfast clubs.