Recommendation 1

HM Government Accepted

The Government welcomes the Committee’s report into persistent absence and support for disadvantaged pupils, and we have considered the findings and recommendations of the report carefully. We want every child to achieve their potential. Attending school regularly is crucial - it positively impacts a child’s academic attainment, safety, development and wellbeing. Children who are not attending school regularly miss out on chances to learn, to socialise, and to play an active part in their school community. The Committee’s work is an important contribution to the public debate on school attendance. As the Committee heard, while most children attend school regularly, the pandemic created unprecedented disruption in attendance habits and led to higher rates of persistent and severe absence for some children. Recent data show improvements – the percentage of children persistently absent or not attending school for Covid-related reasons fell to 22.3% in 2022–23, down from 27.5% a year earlier, which is equivalent to around 380,000 fewer pupils persistently not in school. But there remains a long way to go to achieve the goal of achieving pre-pandemic attendance levels or better. The Government had previous success in improving attendance, prior to the pandemic. As the committee has found, there are few quick fixes - sustained improvement in school attendance requires long term focus across the system. In the decade before the pandemic, the Government commissioned the Taylor Review, delivered a tougher definition of persistent absence, drove sustained Ofsted attention, and updated and improved the legal framework alongside wider school reforms. Persistent absence fell from 16.3% in 2010 to 11% in 2014/15 and remained largely stable until 2018/19. To return to these levels or better, the Government is delivering a comprehensive attendance plan. At the heart of the plan are clearer and more consistent new expectations set out in guidance, which seek to promote a ‘support first’ ethos and one in which attendance is everybody’s business. Schools are expected to: publish an attendance policy; appoint a senior attendance champion; use data to identify at-risk pupils early; and work closely with families to support absent pupils. Local authorities are expected to establish an attendance support team and hold termly meetings with every school to plan interventions for children at risk of persistent or severe absence. The new expectations seek to ensure that all schools and local authorities adopt the habits of the best: they reflect the practices of schools and local authorities with higher than average levels of disadvantage, but better than average rates of attendance. They depend in turn on schools, trusts, and local authorities to implement them. To help support the sector achieve these expectations, the Department has established a daily data pilot, with 87% of state-funded schools now participating, helping to ensure that they and local authorities have near real-time attendance data. This allows them to identify need early, spot trends and benchmark against the best to share best practice around the country. The Department has also formed an Attendance Action Alliance, comprised of national leaders from critical sectors like education, health, social care and policing. It works to take practical action to remove barriers to strong attendance and mobilise workforces around the issue. The Government has also launched attendance hubs to enable schools with excellent attendance levels to share resources and advice with other schools in similar circumstances but with high absence. These have recently expanded to 14 in number, which will support improvements across 800 schools, and reach some 400,000 children. Alongside these steps, the Department has employed ten expert attendance advisers who are working with every local authority in the country and a number of Multi-Academy Trusts to put in place effective plans to deliver the new attendance expectations. And the Department has established an attendance mentoring program which is being piloted in five of the Department’s priority education areas – Middlesbrough, Doncaster, Stoke on Trent, Knowsley and Salford – offering intensive one-to-one support for around 1700 absent pupils and building the evidence base on what works. The attendance guidance sets the framework for identifying children who need additional support but, as this inquiry recognised, the individual reasons behind persistent and severe absence often arise from wider challenges. The attendance plan is therefore underpinned by wider education recovery investment and reforms tackling the underlying causes. This includes £5bn worth of direct investment in education recovery, including £400m on teacher training opportunities and up to £1.5bn on tutoring. In addition, the Government is spending £2.9bn annually on the pupil premium, on top of £1.3bn on recovery premium, Schools must spend the pupil premium on