Schools: Attendance
(asked on 12th December 2023) - View Source
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what are (1) the monthly school attendance figures for the most recent academic year for which they are available, and (2) the comparable monthly school attendance figures for the school year 2018–19.
The department holds data on pupil attendance and absence from two sources, the termly National Statistics derived from the School Census, and the Official Statistics in development derived from daily pupil attendance data.
Pupil absence rates for the 2018/19 academic year are only available on a termly basis, therefore the below table displays the latest termly comparison from the same source (School Census).
18/19 Autumn term | 18/19 Spring term | 18/19 Summer term | 21/22 Autumn term | 21/22 Spring term | 21/22 Summer term | 22/23 Autumn term | 22/23 Spring term | |
Overall absence rate | 4.3% | 4.8% | 5.2% | 6.9% | 7.9% | 8.0% | 7.5% | 7.0% |
Rate of sessions recorded as not attending due to COVID circumstances | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 1.6% | 1.0% | 0.1% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
Source: School census, includes state-funded primary, state-funded secondary and special schools
The data used in this answer is published in the National Statistics release on pupil absence in schools in England, which is accessible at:
The department also publishes weekly and termly official statistics in development on pupil attendance. These are derived from daily attendance data automatically submitted by management information systems for participating schools. These statistics are available at:
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/pupil-attendance-in-schools.
Due to the timeliness of this data, and the data being based on a subset of schools, with around 87% coverage, these figures should be viewed as an early indicator for the termly school census based National Statistics shared above.