Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of including absences for religious observances within the category of absences entitled unable to attend school because of unavoidable cause.

The department does not currently have plans to reclassify absences for religious observance.

The law recognises that absences for a small number of circumstances, including for religious observance, are allowable. Where parents choose not to send their child to school on a day that is exclusively set apart for religious observance by the religious body that they belong to, they will not be taken to have failed to secure their child’s regular attendance, and enforcement action cannot be taken. Schools must record such absences in the attendance register using code R, which is classified for statistical purposes as authorised absence. Other forms of authorised absence include illness or suspension from school.

Sessions recorded as ‘unable to attend because of unavoidable cause’ relate to issues that make attendance genuinely impossible, such as unexpected school closure, widespread travel disruption caused by emergencies, or a pupil being in youth detention. It would not be appropriate to classify absence for religious observance, or other types of authorised absence, under the ‘unavoidable cause’ category.