As we approach the end of the Easter holidays and look ahead to another school term, my thoughts turn once again to the children for whom attending school is a challenge. For some, returning to school can be daunting. In my research as Children’s Commissioner, I have explored the impact of missing even the first few days of a new school term on a child’s overall absence rate. My 2022 analysis of attendance patterns found that a child who misses the second, third and fourth day of a new term was predicted to have an overall absence rate of 43%, of 30 days across that term[i] – and the figures continue to show the scale of the absence challenge.
The latest data from the Department for Education, released last Thursday, shows continued improvement in overall and persistent absence rates – the latter meaning where children miss at least 10% of their school sessions. I am still deeply concerned about the thousands of children who are missing out on their right to education – and especially those who are severely absent and missing at least half of their time in school.
The latest statistics for academic year 2024/25 show overall absence rates fell by 0.4 percentage points from 7.2% in 2023/24 to 6.8%. Persistent absence has fallen slightly from about 20% in 2023/24 to about 18%, but this remains eight percentage points higher than in 2018/19 before the pandemic.
Severe absence has seen no improvement since the previous year and now 2.4% of children are absent from school half or more of the time, compared to 2.3% in 2023/24. This remains more than twice as high as the pre-pandemic severe absence rate of 0.85% in 2018/19.
The government is taking steps to address this. In its recent Schools White Paper it set a pledge to improve the attendance rate by 1.3 percentage points compared to the 2023/24 academic year – back to above 94%. Yet prior to the pandemic, attendance rates routinely hit higher than 95%.
That’s why school attendance must be a priority for every service and professional working with children. Children have told me over the past five years they want to be at their local school, with their friends and teachers. So the government’s pledge in the White Paper is a solid step in the right direction – but there should be no limit to our ambition for attendance.
Children who are eligible for free school meals (FSM) and those with identified special educational needs (SEN) have higher rates of persistent and severe absence, relative to their peers. Pupils eligible for FSM are over three and a half times more likely to be severe absentees than those not eligible for FSM and SEN pupils almost four times more likely to be a severe absentee than pupils with no identified SEN. Concerningly, for SEN pupils this gap in severe absence is widening. In 2024/25 severe absence increased for pupils with Education Health and Care Plans (from 6.85% to 7.5%) and SEN support (from 4.4% to 4.5%) but decreased for pupils with no identified SEN (from 1.3% to 1.2%).
Schools are rightly worried about attendance. Last year I asked almost 19,000 schools and colleges about their concerns for pupils. Attendance emerged as the biggest concern for secondary schools (63% of schools) as well as many primary schools (44%).[ii]
Too often, our focus on the headline absence figures masks the greater problem. Behind the improving overall picture are groups of children who are hardest to reach: those missing more than half of school those being home educated not out of choice but as a last resort when needs aren’t met, and those who have disengaged with education completely and are at risk of harm.
In 2024/25, 34,700 children were not engaged in education at all, and my attendance audit showed that these were some of the most vulnerable children in the country.[iii]
If we want to give children the best start in life, it must begin with ensuring that children can access their right to education and attendance worries are addressed early on. Radically improving attendance and returning to pre-pandemic levels will mean giving these most vulnerable children our full attention.
[i] Children’s Commissioner for England, Back into school: New insights into school absence, 2022. Link.
[ii] Children’s Commissioner for England, The Children’s Plan: The Children’s Commissioner’s School Census, 2025. Link
[iii] Children’s Commissioner for England, Voices of England’s Missing Children: The findings of the Children’s Commissioner’s Attendance Audit, 2022. Link
