House of Commons - Public Accounts

Select Committee on Public Accounts Eighteenth Report

1 Progress in improving school attendance

1. Regular absence from school is damaging, making a young person vulnerable to involvement in crime and anti-social behaviour and much more likely to leave school with few or no qualifications. It also disrupts the education of other pupils because teachers have to spend time helping poor attenders catch up with work that they have missed. The absent pupils effectively forfeit the value of their education. In 2003-04, the unit cost of education (teaching, facilities and other resources, but excluding capital expenditure) was £3,620 per pupil. Based on the average daily absence figure of 450,000 pupils, absent pupils missed £1.6 billion worth of education.[2] Even small reductions in absence rates would have a substantial impact on the value of education delivered to pupils.

2. Responsibility for managing and improving school attendance is shared between the Department for Education and Skills, local authorities and schools. The Department designs policy on school attendance, provides guidance to schools and local authorities, runs initiatives to tackle absence, and monitors national performance. Local authorities work with schools and take specific action to improve attendance, including supporting pupils and parents to address any underlying reasons for absence. Schools tackle absence primarily by encouraging good attendance through day-to-day contact with parents and pupils, taking a register, and dealing with absentees.[3]

3. Whenever a pupil does not attend school, their parent or carer must provide an explanation to the school which then decides whether to authorise the absence. Most absence is authorised, occurring for understandable reasons such as illness. Unauthorised absence is often known as "truancy", but it also includes instances such as term-time holidays that are not authorised by the head teacher.[4] Unauthorised absence is the form of absence with which government, education workers and schools have been most concerned.[5]

4. The Department has had three targets to reduce absence in (maintained and independent day) schools (Figure 2), which it seeks to achieve through schools and local authorities. The first two targets to reduce unauthorised absence were missed by a long way, though the Department believes that there has been progress in tackling truancy. Although the number of pupils with very short periods of unauthorised absence has increased, these pupils' average length of absence has come down. The Department believes that some of the increase in shorter episodes is due to head teachers taking a tougher line on persistent absentees and on holidays during term-time, which the head teacher may classify as unauthorised absence. The two effects leave the overall unauthorised absence rate slightly higher than it was ten years ago.[6] In maintained schools, unauthorised absence remained for years at just over 0.7% of half days missed, and then it increased to over 0.8% in 2004-05 (Figure 3).Figure 2: Performance against the Department's absence targets

The Department missed its first two absence targets but is making good progress towards its most recent target

Target Performance

Public Service Agreement 1998
To reduce unauthorised absence by a third between 1999 and 2002
Target missed.
Unauthorised absence fell by 1%: from 0.73% in 1998-99 to 0.72% in 2001-02.

Public Service Agreements 2000 and 2002
To reduce truancy by 10% between 2002 and 2004
Target missed.
Unauthorised absence remained at 0.72% from 2001-02 to 2003-04.

Public Service Agreement 2004
To reduce total absence by 8% between 2003 and 2008 (equivalent to 39,000 more pupils in school each day).
Initial progress has been good.
Total absence has fallen by 6%, from 6.83% in 2002-03 to 6.45% in 2004-05.

Source: C&AG's Report, paras 1.17-1.18, NAO analysis of the Department's (provisional) attendance statistics for 2004-05
Figure 3: Unauthorised absence in maintained schools, 1994-95 to 2004-05

Unauthorised absence has increased slightly since 1994-95

Note: These absence rates do not include the lower absence of day pupils at independent schools, which are included in the Public Service Agreement targets. They are therefore slightly higher than the absence rates that are measured against the targets.

5. Total absence in maintained schools fell by about one percentage point in the nine years to 2003-04 (Figure 4). The most recent (provisional) figures for 2004-05 show a further substantial drop in total absence, from 6.72% in 2003-04 to 6.59%. If this improvement were sustained in subsequent years, the target would be met early, a big achievement for the Department, local authorities and schools. Figure 4: Total absence in maintained schools, 1994-95 to 2004-05

Total absence has been in decline since 2000-01

6. Pupils most likely to be absent from school are those from deprived backgrounds: pupils in secondary schools with a very high take up of free school meals tend to be absent from school on average for seven days a year more than pupils at schools with an average take up of free school meals.[7] Absence from school represents a double disadvantage for pupils already disadvantaged by their home circumstances. Where they do not master basic skills, their chances in life will be poor, and absence can result in long-term costs to society, for example through welfare payments and crime.[8]

7. The Department has spent £885 million from 1997-98 to 2003-04 on its main initiatives that were intended at least in part to reduce absence (Figure 5). Five out of the six initiatives were intended to address poor behaviour as well as reduce absence, and it is not possible to disentangle the two. The Department is therefore unable to identify how much was spent on reducing either total absence or unauthorised absence. The costs of day-to-day attendance management in schools and local authorities are not included in the costs of these initiatives.[9]Figure 5: Expenditure on attendance related initiatives, 1997-98 to 2003-04

The Department has spent £885 million on six initiatives intended, at least in part, to reduce absence

Initiative Expenditure (£m) Activities funded

Excellence in Cities: learning mentors, learning support units 444.0 Provides 10,000 mentors in schools and over 1,000 learning support units intended to help pupils with behavioural issues, poor attendance and weak learning skills.

School Inclusion: Pupil Support Grant
(initiative has now ended) 268.0 A range of activities, including education of excluded pupils, intended to help local authorities reduce exclusion and truancy.

Behaviour Improvement Programme 115.2 Measures to support schools facing the greatest behaviour and attendance challenges, such as multi-agency teams, learning mentors, learning support units and police in schools.

Key Stage 3 Strategy: behaviour and attendance strand 24.4 Provides behaviour and attendance audit and training materials, training days and consultants.

Behaviour Grant
(initiative has now ended) 21.8 Local authority work on inclusion issues, pupils with poor attendance records and pupils at risk of exclusion.

Capital Modernisation Fund: electronic registration
(initiative has now ended) 11.2 Installation of electronic registration systems at secondary schools with high rates of unauthorised absence.

Total expenditure 884.6

Note: An additional £560.1 million will be spent from 2004-05 to 2005-06 on the three continuing initiatives

Source: Department for Education and Skills

8. Where expenditure from the £885 million for behaviour and attendance initiatives has been highly targeted on a relatively small number of schools, it has been more successful. For example, the schools in the first wave of the Behaviour Improvement Programme have collectively achieved improvements in attendance at twice the rate for all schools, and unauthorised absence also fell, bucking the national trend. The Department's initiatives have also helped to reduce permanent exclusions from school by 25%.[10]

9. Good quality absence data is required to monitor progress in reducing absence, identify patterns of absence and pinpoint issues requiring attention, for example schools with high or increasing absence rates. All schools collect "whole school" data (as opposed to pupil-level data) and they now submit it to the Department every term, having submitted annual returns prior to the 2004-05 school year. The returns show authorised and unauthorised absence but do not identify the causes of absence. The Department is looking to improve absence data by collecting it on a pupil-level basis from 2007. This data will permit a more powerful analysis of the factors associated with high absence rates, for example which types of pupils are particularly at risk, and how well individual schools are performing in relation to their context.[11]

10. The amount of authorised and unauthorised absence is affected by decisions of head teachers on whether to approve absence, for example for holidays during term-time. This local effect is one reason why the Department decided to focus more recently on total absence, which can be more reliably measured.[12] Causes of absence are important. At one extreme, absence owing to illness is understandable but truancy, which may be condoned by parents, is always of great concern. Because the Department's Public Service Agreement target focuses on total absence, there is a risk of losing sight of unauthorised absence, but the Department plans to continue to monitor unauthorised absence and, within that, truancy.[13]



© Parliamentary copyright 2006	Prepared 19 January 2006