Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of the charity School-Home Support report entitled Strengthening the bridge between home and school, published on 26 November 2024; and whether she intends to investigate the issues raised in the report.

This government is determined to tackle the generational challenge of school absence, which is a fundamental barrier to learning and life chances. Missing school regularly is harmful to a child’s attainment, safety and physical and mental health, limiting their opportunities to succeed.

The ‘Strengthening the bridge between home and school’ report, published by School-Home Support in November 2024, gives an overview of some of the complex factors which affect school attendance.

We recognise that the barriers to attending regularly can be wide and complex, both within and beyond the school gates, and are often specific to individual pupils and families. Improving attendance must be everyone’s mission. This is why, in August 2024, the department made its ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance statutory, which promotes a ‘support first’ approach and sets out clear expectations for schools, trusts, and local authorities to work together to tackle absence.

Families of children with attendance issues should receive multi-agency support to help resolve complex out-of-school barriers that might affect their attendance, such as housing, transport or mental ill health. This should be from the team or service best placed to support the family and their needs, which may be the school, a local authority team or service, or another statutory partner, such as a health professional. For example, in the case of a pupil experiencing barriers to attendance because of a housing issue, the lead practitioner may more sensibly be the family’s housing officer.

Schools can also allocate pupil premium funding, which has now increased to over £2.9 billion for the 2024/25 financial year, to support disadvantaged pupils with identified needs to attend school regularly.

The department’s work to support school attendance is also supported by broader investments, including funded breakfast clubs for all primary schools to ensure children start their day ready to learn. We are also working across government on plans to provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school, new Young Futures Hubs, including access to mental health support workers, and an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat children and adults.

In addition to this work, the department is also providing tangible direct support for pupils who struggle with their attendance through our attendance mentor programmes. Over £17 million is being invested across two mentoring projects that will support at least 12,000 pupils in 15 areas. The mentoring pilots are designed to work with pupils to tackle individual causes of persistent absence. These programmes are being rigorously evaluated, and the effective practice that we develop will be shared with schools and local authorities nationally.