This is a joint blogpost from the Datalab team and the University of Bristol’s Professor Simon Burgess

The fact that ministers believe the best place for children to be right now is in school couldn’t be much clearer, with the Department for Education going as far as to threaten legal action to try to ensure that.

But newly published figures show quite how high absence from school is, as the second wave of coronavirus continues to take its toll.

Local variation

At headline level, the figures show that attendance in all state schools was 84.6% on Thursday 10 December, down from 85.5% the week before that.

But, as we noted in our previous blogpost on the topic, secondary school pupils are missing school at a far higher rate than primary school pupils: attendance rates are around 89% and 80% respectively.

This is fairly unsurprising, given that secondary school-age children are currently the age group where Covid-19 rates are highest.

And the new data show very starkly that the national figures mask considerable variation at local authority level.

Before we continue, it’s worth saying that these figures have been collected by the Department for Education based on a survey of schools, with less than a 100% response rate. In the case of some individual local authorities, the response rate is as low as a quarter of schools. But in most local authorities it is well above that level. Our advice would be to feel confident using the figures, but to accept that they are best used as a broad guide to attendance rates in a given area, rather than getting hung up on single digit percentage point differences.

With that duly noted, use the chart below to explore the figures at a local level.

Attendance rates were as low as 53% last week for secondary schools in Medway – currently the place with the highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country. (In fact, two weeks earlier it had been even lower – 38%.)

The next chart shows the change in attendance rates between 15 October and 10 December. Again, it’s important to bear in mind that the data comes from a survey, and that different schools may have responded on the two dates. But it gives an indication of quite how much attendance has deteriorated by in the south-east of England, as well as in other parts of England.

The south-east of the country has seen a particular rise in Covid cases in recent weeks, and the following chart makes clear quite how strong the relationship is between Covid-19 case rates and school attendance rates. (Covid-19 figures for 9 December are the latest available at the time of writing.)

To say that there’s a clear relationship would be understating things.

It’s also very clear from the chart that the local infection rate is not the only factor affecting attendance. In the range of 100 to 200 cases per 100,000 individuals, there is considerable variation in attendance. Among local authorities with around 150 cases per 100,000 individuals, for example, you have both Nottingham with 73% attendance for secondary pupils and Northumberland with 89%.

Why this matters

We noted in our previous post back at the end of October that the north-west of the country was particularly badly affected by pupil absence, and that it was pupils in the poorest areas of the country who were missing the most schooling.

In the latest data, there is much less correlation between secondary attendance and disadvantage at local authority level. In our previous post, the correlation was -0.48. Now it stands at -0.15. Attendance has tended to fall since October in less disadvantaged areas. Data for local authorities in each region is plotted below.

It is, of course, of no consolation whatsoever to now see other parts of the country faring just as badly.

Coming in the new year: Aspire Attendance Tracker

In the new year FFT will be starting the rollout of our new attendance tracking system for secondary schools. Aspire Attendance Tracker will allow schools to track their attendance – including the impact of Covid-19 – on a week-by-week basis. Most importantly, it will also enable schools to compare their attendance to other FFT schools nationally.

Log in to Aspire now and click on the new Attendance Tracker dropdown menu to find out more and prepare for the rollout.

As we said before, individual schools’ attendance will be below even the lows revealed by the local figures highlighted here. There are almost bound to be schools with attendance below 50%.

And, taking things one step further, it is very likely that different pupils within those schools have different experiences: some missing even more school than the school average.

One thing that the figures give no indication of is how things are varying by year group – as a starting point, we would like to know: are Year 11s experiencing a higher level of absence than Year 7s?

All of this is of great concern, given that pupils will be assessed at the end of their Key Stage in a way that doesn’t take into account the amount of learning they have lost out on. For the pupils in the worst affected parts of the country, that won’t seem very fair at all. And we probably won’t know which will have been the worst affected parts of the country until all this is over.

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