Elementary school teacher greeting group of smiling students outside school entrance

I had not intended to write about attendance this week.

My recent posts have already taken me through questions of engagement, participation, inclusion and regulation. However, a BBC News article published today made me pause.

The headline announcement was striking: every mainstream state school in England will be given its own target to improve pupil attendance.

My initial reaction was not entirely positive.

I have spent much of my professional life working alongside children and young people with SEND, including pupils for whom attending school has become difficult or, at times, impossible. I have seen how quickly conversations about absence can move towards percentages, expectations and compliance while the reasons a pupil is struggling to attend become less visible.

So the language of attendance targets makes me uneasy.

But headlines rarely tell the whole story.

Having looked more closely at the latest attendance data and, importantly, the government’s own statutory guidance, I think the picture is more nuanced. There are aspects of the current approach that deserve recognition.

The question, perhaps, is not whether we should want better attendance.

Of course we should.

The more important question is how we achieve it.

The attendance figures matter

The latest Department for Education attendance data shows that overall attendance during the 2025/26 academic year was 93.07%.

Persistent absence – defined as missing 10% or more of possible school sessions – stood at 19.05%.

That remains considerably higher than before the pandemic.

However, the figures become particularly interesting when SEND is considered.

Pupil groupOverall absencePersistent absence
No identified SEN5.80%16.11%
SEN Support10.07%29.34%
Education, Health and Care Plan13.64%36.94%

More than a third of pupils with an EHCP were persistently absent during the year.

This should concern us.

But it should also make us curious.

If pupils with identified SEND are substantially more likely to be absent from school, we need to be careful about treating attendance simply as a behaviour requiring correction.

Absence may be the visible outcome of something else.

From disengagement to absence

This connects closely with a small-scale study I recently carried out into secondary disengagement.

One of the clearest findings was that engagement was not a fixed quality residing within a pupil.

Pupils were not simply “motivated” or “unmotivated”, “engaged” or “disengaged”.

Their engagement changed according to the conditions around them.

Relationships mattered. Belonging mattered. Predictability mattered. Sensory and emotional safety mattered. Pupils were more able to participate when learning felt manageable, when adults treated them respectfully and when they had some agency over how they sought help or responded when overwhelmed.

Some pupils were already beginning to withdraw long before their attendance became a concern.

They might stop contributing in lessons, avoid particular subjects, repeatedly ask to leave, arrive late, rely increasingly upon a safe space or become quietly compliant while experiencing significant anxiety.

This led me to distinguish between presence and participation.

A pupil can be physically present at school without being meaningfully engaged in education.

Equally, increasing difficulty attending may be the final stage of a much longer process of disengagement.

Participation is more than physical attendance

I returned to this idea in Participation Before Diagnosis.

There, I argued that behaviour and attendance data should prompt curiosity rather than immediate judgement.

A pupil who struggles to enter school may be communicating that participation has become difficult, unsafe or unsustainable.

That does not mean that every absence is caused by school.

The reasons children miss education are complex. Illness, family circumstances, poverty, mental health, transport, sleep, experiences outside school and many other factors can contribute.

Nor does recognising barriers mean abandoning expectations around attendance.

It means resisting the temptation to assume we understand the problem simply because we can measure its outcome.

A percentage tells us that a pupil is absent.

It cannot, by itself, tell us why.

The government guidance deserves more attention than the headline

This is where I think some balance is important.

Reading only about new school attendance targets could create the impression of a predominantly accountability-driven approach.

Yet the Department for Education’s current statutory guidance, Working Together to Improve School Attendance, contains a much more relational message.

It asks schools to identify patterns early, listen to pupils and parents, understand barriers, remove barriers within school and help families access support where difficulties sit outside school.

It specifically reminds schools to consider pupils whose attendance is affected by physical or mental ill health or SEND, including the need for additional support and reasonable adjustments.

Perhaps most importantly, it describes successful work on the root causes of absence as requiring professionals to work:

“in partnership with, not against families.”

I think that matters.

It is also important that, according to the BBC report, the proposed school targets will take account of local circumstances and there are not currently plans for automatic penalties when a school misses its target. Schools falling behind may instead be offered guidance, data and access to support from other schools.

That is considerably more nuanced than simply telling every school to reach 95%.

There is therefore plenty within the government’s stated approach that I support.

My concern is what can happen when a thoughtful principle meets a performance measure.

When the target becomes the intervention

Targets can tell us something useful.

They can identify patterns, expose inequalities and prevent persistently poor attendance from becoming normalised. Schools should absolutely notice when pupils begin to disappear from education.

But a target is not an intervention.

If the number itself becomes the primary measure of success, there is a risk that pressure moves downwards: from government to school, school to family, and family to child.

For some pupils that may work. A clearer expectation, improved routines or additional encouragement may be enough to make attendance more consistent.

For another pupil, greater pressure may intensify the very difficulty preventing attendance.

This is particularly important when absence is associated with anxiety, sensory distress, bullying, relational difficulties, masking, exhaustion or unmet SEND.

The question then becomes:

Are we trying to change the attendance figure, or are we trying to change the conditions that produced it?

Those goals are not necessarily the same.

Friday clubs – a simple idea with an interesting principle

The government’s suggestion that schools consider additional clubs and enrichment on Fridays initially sounds almost quaint alongside such a complicated problem.

Friday attendance is consistently weaker, and the government is interested in whether providing enjoyable activities might help pupils remain engaged through to the end of the week.

I actually think there is something worth considering here.

Not because a lunchtime club will solve persistent absence.

It won’t.

But because underneath the suggestion is an acknowledgement that children may be more likely to attend environments in which they experience connection, interest, competence and belonging.

For one pupil, football might provide that connection. For another it might be art, gaming, drama, animals, music, gardening, Lego or simply spending time with a trusted adult and a small group of peers.

The important element is not really Friday.

It is belonging.

And rather than deciding what should motivate pupils, perhaps we could ask them what makes school worth coming to.

Doing to, or doing with?

That brings me to my most recent reflection: From Doing To to Doing With.

Although that article was about regulation support, the same questions seem relevant to attendance:

  • Who has defined the difficulty?
  • Who decides what successful change looks like?
  • What is the young person communicating?
  • What is already helping?
  • What barriers can adults remove?
  • What are adults prepared to change?
  • How will we know that the solution is sustainable for the pupil?

“Doing with” does not mean that attendance no longer matters.

It does not mean that children decide independently whether education is optional.

And it does not mean schools should passively accept prolonged absence.

It means maintaining expectations while working alongside the pupil and family to understand what makes meeting those expectations possible.

That distinction matters.

What might a curious response to absence look like?

When attendance begins to deteriorate, schools already have access to enormous amounts of data.

Perhaps the most useful next step is not always another percentage, but a better question.

We might ask:

  • Which days, lessons, spaces or transitions are most difficult?
  • When does the pupil attend more successfully?
  • What is different on those occasions?
  • Are there particular relationships that increase or reduce the pupil’s sense of safety?
  • Are sensory, communication or organisational demands contributing?
  • Is the pupil experiencing repeated failure, sanction or public correction?
  • Does the pupil have a reliable way to request help or temporarily step away?
  • What does the pupil say about school?
  • What does the family notice before and after difficult days?
  • What is one manageable change we could test?
  • What would make attendance more sustainable rather than simply more immediate?

Some pupils will require relatively simple changes.

Others will need targeted intervention, specialist involvement, adaptations to provision or significant multi-agency support.

There will not be one solution, because persistent absence is not one problem.

Attendance as an outcome

I want children to attend school.

More than that, I want children to attend schools in which they can participate, learn, develop relationships, experience success and feel that they belong.

Those ambitions should not be in opposition.

Indeed, perhaps the most sustainable way of improving attendance is to stop treating attendance as an isolated behaviour and start seeing it as one possible outcome of a much wider educational experience.

The government’s own guidance gives us some helpful language for doing this: monitor, listen, understand, support and remove barriers.

The challenge will be ensuring that this philosophy survives the introduction of targets.

Because if a child returns to school through fear, pressure or escalating consequences while the conditions that made attendance difficult remain unchanged, the percentage may improve without the underlying problem being resolved.

But if attendance improves because a pupil feels safer, better understood, more successful, more connected and better able to access learning, something much more important has changed.

Perhaps, then, the most useful question is not simply:

How do we get this pupil back into school?

But:

What would need to be true for this pupil to be able to attend, participate and belong?

The first question gives us an attendance target.

The second might help us reach it.

Sources and further reading