How big is the problem of pupils turning up but missing lessons?

Internal truancy is “an issue we’re dealing with daily, across all year groups”, says Sarah Bone, executive headteacher at Headlands Schools in Bridlington.

While the absence problems we’ve seen post-pandemic appear to be starting to ease (mostly) - persistent and overall absence both improved year-on-year in the latest data (though severe absence increased) - schools have warned internal truancy is the hidden problem inside the attendance crisis.

Nearly half of secondary teachers surveyed by Teacher Tapp last year said internal truancy was a bigger issue at their school than external truancy, while a further one in four said they were equally large issues.

“Even more secondary school teachers were worried about [internal truancy] than they were about attendance,” says Kiran Gill, chief executive of charity The Difference.

“It intersects with all those challenges we know about - the most anxious generation of young people we’ve seen, mobile phones, an epidemic of loneliness.”

The problem is compounded by the fact that published attendance data from the Department for Education provides little insight into the prevalence of internal truancy.

But now, using aggregated data extracted and anonymised from Arbor MIS, the Key Group has attempted to assess the scale of pupils arriving at school but missing at least one lesson.

“We know that school leaders are working very hard to ensure that pupils are attending school, and that, once there, they remain in the classroom. Until now, though, we have not had a sense of what this looks like across the country,” says Arbor CEO and founder James Weatherill.

Pupils missing at least one lesson

From their analysis, the team concluded that on 2 October 2025 (a school census day), from a sample of 225 secondary schools serving more than 200,000 students, around one in 50 (2 per cent) were marked present in the first morning and afternoon registration but missed at least one lesson without authorisation.

The data cannot tell us for sure that these students were internally truanting, or, indeed, be compared to any other published data. However, it gives the first indication of how many students could be out of lessons on a given day.

“We probably see a handful of children, maybe four or five per period, out of lessons,” Bone says.

“It’s become more apparent since Covid, and we’ve had to become even tighter around what our systems look like to tackle it.”

In the data, students eligible for free school meals (FSM) were nearly twice as likely to have missed at least one lesson, and those with special educational needs and disabilities were more than twice as likely to have missed a lesson compared with their peers without SEND.

Students eligible for FSM and with SEND were more than three times as likely to have missed at least one lesson than students with neither.

Those with social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs were the most likely to have arrived at school but have missed at least one lesson.

As children get older, they are more likely to miss a lesson - with around 1 per cent of Year 7 students in the sample missing at least one lesson compared with 3.3 per cent of Year 11s.

Overall, says Gill, this evidence “shows us a pattern we should be worried about, which is that it’s the children facing the hardest childhoods and times in their childhoods that are struggling to stay in class”.

Post-pandemic impact

One secondary senior leader in Staffordshire tells Tes they do not find the figures shocking because of their own experience and what they have heard from colleagues. They point to the effects of school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic as a key driver of internal truancy.

“When we came out of Covid, I felt that we had students in school who just weren’t coping with the socialisation aspect of school and being in a building with other people, and then also children who I felt had spent quite an influential part of their childhood maybe getting away with ignoring instructions at home, then coming to school and maybe feeling they could come to school and choose what to do and when to do it.”

The problem might have grown worse since the pandemic in some schools, but Department for Education behaviour adviser Tom Bennett feels that internal truancy has always been an issue.

“There’s no really hard comparative data you can rely on anyway,” he says, “but I don’t get a sense that it’s become more of an issue than it ever was.”

However, as part of the new analysis, school leaders flagged steep declines in children’s mental health post-pandemic, along with growth in additional needs, as being behind the increase in pupils missing lessons.

“One in five 8- to 16-year-olds now have a probable mental health concern, and that’s up from one in 10 in 2017, pre-Covid,” Headlands’ associate deputy head for quality of care, Ben Cooke, tells Tes.

“That is something, as a secondary school, we are managing. So when we see that a student’s unable to stay in a lesson, what we’re effectively seeing is the physical manifestation of the national issue around mental health concerns, and that’s something, coupled with a rise in SEND, that’s spilling out into our corridors.”

So how can schools tackle this? And what support do they need?

For Bennett, one of the most effective approaches for tackling internal truancy is simply having a response system in place, whereby as soon as a pupil is marked absent from a lesson, it is flagged up on the system and a staff member goes to look for them. Staff members should also be actively patrolling public spaces in the school, he adds.

“Sanctions and penalties don’t fix everything, but one of the things that they’re really good for is clamping down on this type of behaviour,” Bennett says. “If kids realise they’re going to get caught and they’re going to get some kind of penalty, they’ll make a much greater effort to get to lessons in time.”

Gill believes that schools having access to meaningful data on internal truancy will help to shape their responses. She hopes that school leaders will be able to use the new report to “get ahead of things and work out what some of the drivers are for that disengagement”.

“We have worked with some leaders who’ve done just that, and then their internal absence data starts to shift,” she adds.

‘Sanctions and penalties don’t fix everything, but one of the things that they’re really good for is clamping down on this type of behaviour’

Leaders reported that they were employing measures like having three members of staff patrolling corridors at all times, installing locks on their toilet blocks during lessons, and having attendance officers monitoring whether pupils have turned up for lessons in real time using the school’s MIS.

“When the register is taken, if a child hasn’t arrived, the register will send an alert to the attendance team, who will put out a radio call,” Bone explains.

Her school has a member of staff on call, who will try to pick up the child and have a conversation with them about why they aren’t in their lesson.

“It might be that something’s happened outside of school. If that’s the case, then there’ll be pastoral support at our hub. It could be that there’s been a fallout with friends, they could just be saying they don’t want to be in the class, or there could be some defiance going on that’s going to need longer than a conversation to unpick,” Bone says.

In the latter case, at Headlands the student will spend some time in a supervised “return to learn” space, and their head of year will have further conversations with them later on.

Bone, Cooke and the safeguarding team will then decide what support the child needs in meetings they hold twice a week to discuss patterns of behaviour on internal truancy.

As this shows, it takes a lot of manpower to effectively deal with this issue. The Staffordshire leader says that at their school, they have staff monitoring CCTV footage as well as on the ground searching for students who have been flagged as out of lessons.

The support schools need

They add that what schools really need to be able to tackle internal truancy is the funding to employ enough support staff and provide the right level of pastoral care to make sure pupils who are struggling feel able to attend lessons.

At the moment, this isn’t happening. Pro Bono Economics has found that local authority spending on early intervention children’s services fell by more than £2 billion in real terms between 2010-11 and 2023-24.

There have also been repeated warnings that schools have become the “fourth emergency service”, and that the burden placed on teachers and leaders has never been higher amid crumbling public services.

“We don’t have the funding or the training and clinical expertise required to support the young people in our community with some of those needs,” Cooke says.

“We do everything we can to be proactive and identify as early as possible where challenges are emerging, but we are increasingly frustrated, alongside parents, that the support their children need isn’t available.”

As part of its reforms to the SEND system, the government will provide funding to create banks of specialists that schools can draw from in their local area. And while the schools White Paper does not specifically mention internal truancy, it points to new attendance and behaviour hubs as the vehicle by which it will strengthen early intervention in these areas.

It remains to be seen whether those changes will be enough to shift the dial on so many children turning up to school only to miss out on actually learning.