Among the many issues that everyone can agree are prevalent in our school system, one seems to be heralded as the key to all else: attendance.

It is an issue around which education secretary Bridget Phillipson has focused huge amounts of attention and funding, via new government initiatives; on which think tanks have released countless reports; and which schools are eagerly trying to find ways to solve.

Last month, the Department for Education announced that every school will be given an individual minimum target to boost attendance, powered by artificial intelligence - a move that Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), dismissed as yet another “diktat dreamt up in Whitehall”.

And in August, there was the appointment of new government behaviour and attendance ambassadors, who oversee 90 hubs that will work to support 500 schools with “weak attendance and poor behaviour”, aided by £1.5 million of funding.

Meanwhile, attendance is also a focus area for the Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence teams, which were introduced last year.

There is no doubt that there is an attendance challenge. The most recent annual data shows that, while 2024-25 saw the biggest year-on-year improvement in a decade, severe absence (when pupils miss 50 per cent or more of school sessions) reached a new high of 2.04 per cent, and persistent absence (when students miss 10 per cent or more) remained stubbornly high at 18.7 per cent.

But there are an awful lot of similarly damning statistics on other areas of education. So, how did we come to attendance as the key issue? More importantly, how sure are we that steps to tackle persistent absence will actually lead to a significant shift in outcomes?

Why focus on attendance?

When it comes to the reasoning for pinpointing attendance as a key area of focus, it helps that there has been a lot of research done on how attendance can affect a pupil’s life.

According to a report published by the DfE in March, key stage 4 children with good attendance have twice the odds of achieving a grade 5 in English and maths GCSE compared with peers who miss 10 school days, and three times the odds compared with students who attend 85-90 per cent of the time.

Taking this further, the DfE has also estimated the impact of attendance on students’ futures, finding that one day of additional absence between Years 7 and 11 was associated with an approximate £750 loss in future earnings.

In addition, it found the likelihood of being in receipt of benefits aged 28 increases by 2.7 times for students classified as persistently absent, and 4.2 times for those who are severely absent.

Of course, there are countless other factors that might influence both a student’s school attainment and their future life, so in making these estimates, further details - including first language, free school meals eligibility, special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) status and disadvantage level - were controlled for.

Included in the same paper, however, is a statistic that has since been widely repeated: that persistently absent students earn an average of £10,000 less per year than those with good attendance, rising to almost £20,000 for severely absent students.

The report notes that these estimates do not control for any socioeconomic characteristics that may affect earnings.

Statistics on attendance

Dan Lilley, senior researcher at The Centre for Social Justice, explains that the DfE’s reports linking attendance to attainment and to future earnings use two different methods.

The first report matched absence data (collected via the school census) to attainment results collected from awarding bodies. The second “looks through other studies about the impact of attendance on income, and summarises the aggregate results”, Lilley explains.

He adds that both are sound statistical methods and “both have really good controls”. But the reports nonetheless pose a challenge: isolating causation can be difficult because of multicollinearity (where you have multiple independent variables that are closely correlated).

When it comes to lower attainment, for instance, there are lots of linked variables that are known to cause this, but which also “cause each other”, Lilley explains.

“For example, there is a strong correlation between SEND and disadvantage,” he says. “Both of those things also correlate with lower attainment. But it’s very difficult statistically to draw out the impact of each of them individually on attainment, because they also impact one another.”

‘Correlation rather than causation’

However, this doesn’t mean the estimates aren’t valid.

“They are definitely true,” says Katie Beynon, statistician at FFT Education Datalab, “but it means we’re limited to saying absence is associated with other outcomes, or a pupil whose absence is at X per cent is more or less likely than similar pupils whose attendance is higher or lower to get a particular outcome.”

Ultimately, this means the result is “a correlation rather than a causation, which doesn’t make it not true. But it’s not in the power of the data to say that it’s a direct consequence of absence”, she explains.

In addition, Beynon points out that there are many factors we can’t measure, which means we can’t control for them: “You can’t measure parental support or pupil mental wellbeing” - but these certainly impact attendance.

Lilley adds that ambition is another important yet unmeasurable factor.

“It’s almost impossible to measure ambition because it’s attitudinal. It’s very hard to gauge how much a child is motivated and thinks they will succeed, but it has a massive impact on how well they do,” he says.

These immeasurable factors mean that “there are definitely holes” in the estimates, he adds. But to some degree, this is always an issue with statistical modelling.

In fact, measurability is an important factor when considering attendance at all.

The ease of gathering data

Compared with many aspects of a pupil’s schooling, it is statistically straightforward to record whether they have attended or not. And it’s never been easier for the government to track how schools are doing in this area, thanks to the weekly national dashboards, which the DfE introduced in 2022.

“Part of the focus on attendance is because the data is really good live, but part of why the data is really good live is because of how much we’re focused on it,” says Lilley, adding that another reason “why attendance is so front and centre is because people understand it - because we have the numbers”.

Christian Bokhove, professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton, agrees. “The things you want to measure become the new benchmark because they are easy to measure,” he says, adding that, for policymakers, “it is convenient to focus on something that’s easily measurable”.

But there are concerns that attendance data - while politically useful because of its apparent clarity of message - is too crude a measure to make sense of how well pupils are truly being supported by their schools.

A lack of nuance

Furthermore, existing approaches to counting absences do not always accurately reflect who is in school and who isn’t.

“I think the work that the DfE is doing to encourage schools to analyse data is positive,” says Margaret Mulholland, SEND and inclusion specialist at ASCL. But she adds that the codes schools use to register attendance, last updated in 2024, lack the nuance to support inclusive practice.

For example, “remote learning, which is sometimes a positive stepping stone back into education, is counted as an authorised absence, even if you’ve got a live teacher”, she says.

This means that a day of remote learning is treated in the data as the equivalent of missing a day of school for sickness.

Another concern, Mulholland explains, is that registration can only be open for 30 minutes, after which pupils must be marked absent. “What schools are telling us is that where young people are working their way back to school on a part-time timetable, it is often understood as an authorised absence because they’re not attending the main school registration,” she says.

This can also affect children who are sometimes late because of responsibilities at home - perhaps they are a young carer. Because of the 30-minute window, “they’re perceived to be a child with persistent or severe attendance issues”, Mulholland says, explaining that this is a two-fold problem.

Firstly, the data “isn’t telling us enough” - it’s not useful for a pupil to be labelled as having persistent or severe absence without understanding the root cause.

And what’s more, Mulholland says, “it’s not rewarding that child when they do get into school, even if they are late, but perhaps they’ve dropped off two siblings on the way. How does that build their resilience, if they are in school for the rest of the morning but that’s not recognised?”

Bokhove agrees, adding that attendance is a “reductive measure” that simply says, “If you’re there, that’s OK, and if you’re not, it’s not OK.” When, of course, the truth is far more complicated.

What detail does attendance miss?

Tamsin Ford, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, points out that two increasingly common reasons for absence are a rise in mental health issues and a rise in children with SEND, whose needs are not always being met.

But concurrently, a child experiencing these challenges may still be present in school, yet unable to properly access the curriculum.

“Anxiety, depression, eating disorders - all of them impact your ability to concentrate,” she says. “Autism may or may not come along with learning problems, but it certainly impacts children’s ability to cope with the less structured aspects of school.

“For neurodiversity, including ADHD or autism, when you look at the characteristics that those children have, our current school system really is not suited to supporting them,” Ford adds.

Clearly, just because you are in school, it doesn’t mean you don’t have barriers to learning.

Efua Poku-Amanfo, research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, adds that the curriculum itself can be a barrier, explaining how her research has found that young people feel the “curriculum doesn’t necessarily represent their real-world experiences, or the skills and knowledge they want to develop for their futures”.

Of course, the recent curriculum and assessment review attempted to tackle this, with its proposals for more “relevant and inclusive” subject content, but it remains to be seen how much of a difference this will make in practice.

“We need to go back to basics and ask whether education is actually serving every single young person, whether education is accessible to every single young person,” says Poku-Amanfo, arguing that, on its own, being present in school is not enough.

Many argue that improving attendance should not be a goal in and of itself.

“What we don’t want to see is anything that improves just attendance,” says Beynon, adding that it would be fruitless to improve attendance figures without tackling the problems that lead to absence.

Jean Gross, an independent consultant and education expert, adds that what is required is to “look under the bonnet of attendance. You have to say: what’s driving that? Is it the curriculum? Is it a feeling of a lack of agency? Is it mental health?”

Caroline Bond, a senior lecturer at Manchester Institute of Education, agrees, describing attendance as the “canary in the coal mine”. If a pupil is regularly absent, “it’s showing us something’s wrong”, she says.

But sometimes the focus on attendance above all else undermines schools’ ability to properly address those underlying issues, says Mulholland, who describes “inconsistencies in policy”.

“Despite good intentions and a support-first approach, the guidance asks you to put attendance first and foremost,” she says, “and that puts schools under pressure in relation to the expectations around that attendance in a way that might preclude thinking about the child’s needs first and foremost, because your attendance data is damaged if those children come in in a part-time sense. That is problematic.”

Wider crisis of lost learning

One solution might be for policymakers to broaden the discussion around attendance, suggests Poku-Amanfo, ensuring that we are speaking not solely about attendance but also about the wider “crisis of lost learning”.

Pupils with poor attendance are often the same groups who are more prone to exclusions, internal truancy and school refusal, she explains. In speaking about these as separate problems, “we might be missing a trick to get control of this”, she adds.

Meanwhile, others point to even more crucial policies that would have a greater impact than putting pressure on schools to improve their attendance.

Gross points to how attendance intersects with poverty. “If you’ve got 37 per cent of disadvantaged pupils who are persistently absent, I don’t think you can tackle all of that at an individual level with mentoring and family support or rewards or sanctions,” she says. “That’s something more fundamental, because more than a third is a heck of a figure.”

Bond agrees, arguing that addressing the root cause of non-attendance - which for many young people is poverty - would in turn solve the attendance crisis. As part of the Budget announcements last week, the government pledged to remove the two-child benefit cap from April 2026 - a move Bond welcomes.

“The early years are so crucial developmentally, and that would then have an impact on those children from birth, rather than thinking about what happens when they’re aged 3, 4, 5 and up. If we were addressing those underlying issues, we would have a greater impact,” she says.

Pressure on schools

Of course, the government is looking at these areas, with a much delayed Schools White Paper - due to set out SEND reforms - set to be published in the new year, and a cross-government task force overseeing the development of a new child poverty strategy.

Yet there remains the sense that attendance can’t wait for reform, that schools must fix attendance now; something Mulholland describes as “the pressure to bring children in at all costs”.

“But,” says Bond, “we can’t expect schools to do everything.”

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