Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the number of school days that have been lost as a result of pupils being sent home due to a covid-19 outbreak in (a) primary schools and (b) secondary schools in (i) England (ii) the North West and (iii) Halton constituency since 1 August 2020.

The Department is currently collecting data on attendance of pupils and staff, and the availability of remote learning, from schools on a daily basis and publishes data from this collection as part of the official statistics series. The publication can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/attendance-in-education-and-early-years-settings-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak. Data is published from 9 September 2020, but prior to 12 October 2020 information on pupils isolating was not collected.

Data on the number of pupils sent home due to a pupil in their cohort testing positive is not collected. The closest estimate of this figure is the number of pupils isolating in each school due to a potential contact with a case of COVID-19 within the setting.

Data is collected as totals for each school. It is therefore not possible to calculate a cumulative total, instead figures for each individual week (which may include the same pupils in both weeks) are provided. It is also not possible to calculate the number of school days lost as a result of absence.

Data is collected from schools and aggregated to local authority level. The Department intends to publish regional and local authority level data on 15 December. This data will be included as part of the publication ‘Attendance in education and early years settings during the coronavirus (Covid 19) outbreak’.

The frequency of the publication ‘Attendance in education and early years settings during the coronavirus (Covid 19) outbreak’ will be reviewed in the new year.

The Department is constantly reviewing the content of its publications. Announcements about future content will be made through the official statistics release page: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education/about/statistics.