When we last looked at absence back in November, we found that there had been little change from the previous year at primary, and a slight reduction at secondary.
In this post, we’ll see whether these china rcs data patterns held for the rest of the term. With a full term of data under our belts, we’ll also take a more detailed look at persistent absence.
Data
As usual, data for this post comes from our FFT Attendance Tracker schools – around 6,000 primary and 2,500 secondary schools across England. And we’ll be looking at the period from the beginning of September up until Friday 20th December.
Weekly absence
To start, let’s look at pupils’ absence rates in each week across the term, and compare with the same weeks of the previous academic year.
Overall, there’s not too much difference in the shapes of these charts. At both primary and secondary, absence tended to increase as term went on, reaching a peak in the week before the Christmas holidays.
At primary, the lines for this Autumn and last are almost on top of each other, indicating little change in absence rates overall. At secondary, it looks like the slight reduction in absence we saw in the first half-term continued into the second.
Reasons for absence
We can dig down by splitting overall absence into three categories, according to how schools recorded the absences in their registers: illness, unauthorised, and other[1].