In our blog post from 2022, we discussed the concerning rise in pupil absence following the return to school since the Covid-19 pandemic. We found alarming increases in both authorised and unauthorised absences, as well as the striking fact that around 7 million additional school days per term were being lost due to pupil illness compared to before the pandemic. Our initial analysis focused on data from the 2021/22 autumn term however, following the publication of DfE data on pupil absence in England for the 2023/24 autumn term, we are revisiting this analysis to investigate how the absence landscape is evolving.
As with our previous analysis, we look at autumn term pupil absence rates across England, taking the number of sessions missed because of a particular reason and dividing this by the total number of possible sessions. A session is defined as a morning or afternoon period, with a school day therefore being made up of two sessions. For example, if pupils missed 10,000 sessions due to authorised study, and there were 1,000,000 possible sessions, the absence rate for this reason would be 1%.
Key findings
- The overall absence rate across England is beginning to fall following consecutive post-pandemic increases, now down to 6.7% in the 2023/24 autumn term
- Overall absence rates remain highest in the North East of England at 7.5%, while they are lowest in London at 5.9%
- Unauthorised absence continues to increase, now at 2.2% in 2023/24, and is largely driven by unauthorised absences in secondary schools
- Absence due to illness is now beginning to fall following the Covid-19 pandemic, but an additional 3.3 million school days are still being missed by pupils
- Rates of absence due to unauthorised holidays are now higher than before the pandemic, which may be a result of the ongoing cost of living crisis
- Persistent absence (missing at least 10% of sessions) remains high following the pandemic, while severe absence (missing at least 50% of sessions) rates continue to grow.
Overall absence rates are beginning to return to pre-pandemic levels
Figure 1 – % of total possible sessions missed due to absence across different school phases
In the 2019/20 autumn term prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, pupils across England missed an average of 4.9% of sessions due to absence. Following the return to school after the pandemic, we saw consecutive increases in the overall absence rate, reaching a peak of 7.5% in 2022/23 across all school phases. Encouragingly, in the 2023/24 autumn term there has been a decrease of 0.8% points in the overall absence rate across England, falling to 6.7%. While this figure still remains approximately 37% greater than the absence rate in 2019/20, this fall is welcomed and we will continue to monitor this in the coming years as we look to see this continue to fall back to pre-pandemic levels.
A similar trend can be seen when we look at the overall absence rate across England broken down into school phases. Across each of the state-funded primary, state-funded secondary and state-funded special school phases, we see a sharp rise in overall absence following the return to school after the Covid-19 pandemic, then another increase into 2022/23, followed by a fall in the 2023/24 autumn term.
Figure 2 – % of total possible sessions missed due to absence across regions in England in 2023/24
When we dig into further detail on how different regions of England are contributing to this overall absence rate, we see that overall absence rates remain highest in the North East at 7.5%, while they are lowest in London at 5.9%. Other regions which are contributing to an increased overall absence rate across England are Yorkshire and The Humber, at 7.1%, and the South West, at 7.0%. Understanding the regional differences in absence is key as highlighting regions where good practice may be taking place can help to identify learnings which can be usefully applied across the country.
Unauthorised absence continues to increase following the pandemic
Figure 3 – % of total possible sessions missed due to different absence types across England
As discussed above, following a sharp rise in overall absence across England following the Covid-19 pandemic, we are beginning to see a fall in absence which is now at 6.7% in the 2023/24 autumn term. This fall is entirely attributed to a fall in authorised absences from schools, which has seen a 0.9% point decrease from a peak of 5.4% following the pandemic in 2022/23, to 4.5% in 2023/24. Concerningly, we see that the rate of pupils who are missing school for unauthorised reasons is continuing to increase, from 1.3% prior to the pandemic in 2019/20, to 2.2% in 2023/24. This increase is largely attributed to the rise in unauthorised absence within secondary schools however, we do also see an increasing rate within primary schools. In secondary schools, unauthorised absence has seen a 1.4% point increase, from 1.6% in the 2019/20 autumn term to 3.0% in the 2023/24 autumn term. Meanwhile, while there has also been an increase in unauthorised absence in primary schools across this same time period, this is much smaller at just 0.4% points.
Absence due to illness is falling while unauthorised holiday absence is on the rise
Figure 4 – % of total possible sessions missed due to pupil illness
A key finding from our previous analysis was the steep rise in pupil absence as a result of illness in the return to school following the Covid-19 pandemic. Specifically, we reported that approximately 7 million extra school days were being lost nationwide due to pupil illness in the 2021/22 autumn term compared to 2019/20. When investigating how this has changed with the publication of 2023/24 absence data, we see a decrease in the proportion of sessions lost due to pupil illness, from a peak of 4.5% in 2022/23 to 3.5% in 2023/24. While this is still 0.7% points greater than the pre-pandemic 2019/20 level, and is equivalent to approximately 3.3 million additional school days over the term being lost due to pupil illness, this is a welcome fall from the 7 million days being lost that were discussed in our previous analysis. A similar trend is observed when we look at individual school phases, with each phase seeing a decrease in pupil absence due to illness.
Figure 5 – % of total possible sessions missed due to unauthorised holiday
Another interesting trend that has arisen in our analysis of the newly published data is the increasing rate of sessions being missed as a result of unauthorised holidays. As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw a large drop in the proportion of sessions missed due to unauthorised holiday across all phases between the 2019/20 and 2020/21 autumn terms however, since then, we have seen consecutive increases up to greater proportions than were seen pre-pandemic. For example, in state-funded primary schools, 0.4% of all sessions were missed due to unauthorised holidays in 2019/20 but this has now risen by to 0.6% in 2023/24. With the ongoing cost of living crisis affecting England, we wonder whether this may be a result of an increased number of parents taking their children on holiday outside of the school holidays where costs are lower and holidays more affordable.
Persistence absence remains high and severe absence is becoming more common
Figure 6 – Overall, persistent and severe absence rates across England
Pupils are recorded as being persistently absent when they miss 10% or more of total sessions, while severe absence is defined as missing 50% or more of total sessions. We see that while persistent absence rates across England have begun to fall following the large 11.1% point rise between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 autumn terms, this figure still remains very high at 19.4% in 2023/24. In state-funded primary, secondary and special schools, persistent absence rates are at 15.4%, 23.4% and 36.2%, respectively.
While severe absence rates are much lower than overall and persistent absence rates across England, we are seeing a concerning trend which sees this figure continuing to increase in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic. This has now increased to 2.0% of pupils being noted as severely absent in 2023/24, compared to 0.9% in 2019/20. As expected, severe absence rates are lower in state-funded primary schools (0.8%) compared to state-funded secondary schools (3.1%) and state-funded special schools (6.2%). Focusing on reducing the proportion of pupils missing such a large number of sessions is paramount in improving both their own educational outcomes and wellbeing, but also for their peers through minimising disruption caused by teachers focusing on catch up for absent pupils.
Concluding remarks
The analysis conducted here highlights a welcome fall in absence rates after a sharp rise following the return to school after the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in pupil absence due to illness. In our previous analysis, we concluded by discussing the government’s renewed focus on improving pupil attendance by making tackling absence a priority by improving information gathering on the topic and providing schools with additional support. While this prioritisation appears to have made a positive impact on the pupil absence situation, we hope that the publication of the DfE’s new data tool will further build on these improvements to absence rates across England by allowing schools to sooner identify concerning pupil absence trends and quickly intervene where necessary to drive up attendance.
However, there are still areas of concern including the increasing rates of unauthorised holiday absence and proportion of pupils who are severely absent, as well as the continuing large number of persistent absentees. It is important that future interventions are targeted towards these groups of pupils in particular.
If you’d like to discuss more detailed absence analysis, please do get in touch.
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