absences | Schools Week

Term-time holidays a ‘small part’ of attendance woes – minister

Catherine McKinnell says she’s focused on children who regularly miss ‘significant amounts of school’

Middlesbrough gets help to tackle absences

Tackling persistent absence has become a key priority for ministers after rates soared during the pandemic

Nearly 10% of year 11s still absent from school as exams loom

Leaders describe new data as ‘extremely worrying’ as exam students remain worst-hit by absences

Covid used as an excuse by ‘poor attenders’, warns Ofsted

Ofsted also found remote education has ‘negatively affected’ some pupils’ perception of the need to be in school

Schools must publish improvement plans in absence crackdown

The DfE is consulting on more prescriptive absence rules, ordering schools to be ‘proactive’ and councils to use their ‘full range of legal powers’

Quarter of schools surpass DfE contingency thresholds requiring stricter Covid measures

School leaders are calling for changes to the government’s current Covid guidance

Over 1 million children miss school because of Covid

More than a million children were absent from school last week because of Covid, new government data suggests. Department for Education attendance survey data shows around 1,050,500 pupils, or 14.3 per cent of the total pupil population were absent from state schools because of the virus last Thursday, up 25 per cent from 839,100, or […]

Williamson working to ‘relax Covid measures in schools’

The education secretary has said he is working with colleagues to “relax Covid measures in schools”, after new figures showed another steep rise in absences related to the virus. Gavin Williamson said he would be “looking closely” at the issues “around the need for ongoing isolation of bubbles”, and the outcomes of a trial of […]

Attendance: School Covid contact absences quadruple in a week

The number of pupils absent because of a potential contact with Covid-19 in school has quadrupled in just one week, new government attendance data shows. Attendance survey data published by the Department for Education shows 171,600 pupils missed school on June 17 because of potential contact with the virus in school, up from 40,200 on […]