All schools in England to get pupil attendance targets, government says

Many mainstream schools in England had already been set attendance targets tailored to their circumstances over the past year, but on Thursday the Department for Education (DfE) confirmed that every school would receive its own specific target and that monitoring would begin for the first time. The BBC understands that there will be no immediate financial penalties for schools that fail to meet their targets, although the DfE will engage with institutions that are off‑track to ensure they are aware of the situation and taking corrective steps. Schools that lag behind may be directed toward best‑practice guidance or encouraged to join a local behaviour and attendance hub with other institutions. Ofsted already incorporates overall attendance figures into its inspection framework. In an opinion piece published in The Independent on Thursday, the newly appointed education minister Paul Waugh said the latest attendance statistics showed "progress has slowed over the past year" and that the government's response needed to be "broader, smarter and more ambitious". Waugh added that schools will be granted access to enhanced data‑analysis tools in the coming year to help them scrutinise individual pupils' attendance records, enabling earlier identification of concerns and swifter intervention when pupils start to drift away from regular attendance. He noted that Fridays are "becoming a peculiar weak spot for attendance" and said he would investigate why illness‑related absences tend to be significantly higher at the end of each week. Waugh urged schools to run clubs and enrichment sessions on Fridays "so each kid stays engaged right through to the end of the week". Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the school leaders' union NAHT, said Thursday's attendance data revealed "just how hard it is to drive absence rates back down to pre‑pandemic levels". Whiteman continued, "Schools already go above and beyond in encouraging attendance, but it isn't a problem that they can solve alone or that government targets will fix". He explained that the issue often stems from factors beyond the classroom, including illness, mental‑health challenges, poverty and unmet special educational needs. Whiteman said this underscores the importance of the government's forthcoming reforms to the SEND strategy in England. The data released on Thursday also indicated that around 12% of pupils were absent from school during the week beginning Monday 22 June, when an exceptional heatwave affected parts of England, producing the highest absence rate recorded so far this year. Read the full story at BBC News →