Walking through the corridor, I noticed a Year 5 pupil - Albie - sitting at the regulation station, head in hands. I sat beside him and quietly coloured for a few minutes before attempting a tentative conversation.

“So, how’s your day going?” I asked.

“I’m scoring it negative 5,000 out of 10.”

I laughed. I have a lot of time for Albie. He is funny and engaging, but he finds a lot of school tricky, particularly the noise of the classroom and the emotional demands of social situations. He has an education, health and care plan (EHCP). His attitude towards school is deteriorating, and he is finding it harder to come in.

“What’s happened, then?” I asked.

“Hannah was humming some silly tune, and it annoyed me, and we started arguing,” Albie replied. “Miss said I might have to stay in for a few minutes at lunchtime to finish my work, but I don’t mind.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because no one wants to play with me anyway.”

When you struggle to build and maintain friendships, lunchtime can be the worst part of the day. The school has tried a range of targeted strategies to support Albie - a peer buddy system, social stories and small-group lunchtime clubs.

He is always welcome in the senior leadership team hub for some of Miss Barrett’s jam on toast. He and I have a standing Thursday “chess showdown”, which he often wins.

But these skills do not come easily, and social times take a lot of scaffolding for him to succeed. We’ve tried many approaches with differing levels of success.

Finding your tribe

As children get older, they place more of their self-worth in their peer group. I am a firm believer that children need to find their tribe; it gives them a sense of identity. When they find this, school feels safer. When they don’t, every day becomes harder. This becomes a factor in attendance.

Attendance has taken on an increasingly public profile. Its link with outcomes is well founded, and I understand the government’s desire to raise figures nationally. But the Department for Education’s absence statistics show a steep and persistent stratification by special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) status.

Across the 2024-25 autumn and spring terms, pupils with no identified SEND had an absence rate of 5.66 per cent. For those with SEND, it was 9.63 per cent, and for pupils with an EHCP, it was 12.74 per cent.

That’s almost five weeks of school lost, compared with three and a half weeks for pupils with SEND and two weeks for those without. This means pupils with EHCPs lose more than double the learning time of their peers without SEND.

The effect of SEND on attendance

Meanwhile, persistent absence affected 33.82 per cent of pupils with EHCPs and 14.30 per cent of pupils without SEND, with severe absence at 7.30 per cent for those with an EHCP compared with 1.11 per cent for pupils without SEND.

These figures mirror those in my own local area, where a higher EHCP prevalence is associated with significant reductions in whole-school attendance.

In fact, for every 1 per cent increase in the number of EHCPs, there is a 0.37 percentage point decrease in overall attendance. Taken together, this strongly supports a structural vulnerability model: attendance rates scale with level of need, not simply with behavioural disengagement.

Albie’s attendance is around 83 per cent - about one day off a week.

In November, the DfE announced that every school will be assigned an individual minimum attendance improvement target tailored to location, pupil need and deprivation levels. While the framing acknowledges many underlying factors, I struggle to see how any of this will directly improve Albie’s attendance. He is a square peg being squeezed into a round hole.

If attendance is structurally lower for pupils with higher levels of need, then our response must also be structural. And this isn’t only about funding. It’s about people: speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, mental health practitioners and autism-specialist staff who can intervene early.

Social side of school

It’s also about providing children like Albie with more support to manage the social side of school - to help him find his “tribe”. Albie can’t cope with an hour-long lunchtime - but he could cope with four 15-minute breaks.

A practical first step would be to increase specialist capacity within mainstream schools. Locally, 10 state primaries serve 3,840 pupils; only one has a special support centre (SSC).

I understand why some schools might hesitate. The needs of pupils with EHCPs frequently outweigh the funding allocated, and when an SSC is attached to a mainstream school, all pupils’ attendance and attainment data are included in the school’s performance tables, meaning that to volunteer to open an SSC is to volunteer to depress your published figures.

But if Albie is a square peg being driven into a round hole, why not build schools with round holes?

System change

We have mainstream schools and special schools, with a vast chasm between them. We need more diversity in provision to match the diversity of pupils. In our local primaries alone, 96 pupils have EHCPs and a further 701 are on the SEND register - enough to populate more than three one-form-entry schools.

We could have a round school, a triangle school, even a chiliagon school (a thousand-sided one, before you ask). The question is not whether children like Albie can fit the system, but whether the system is willing to shift enough to fit them.

Stephen Day is the interim headteacher of Bramber Primary School

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