What can schools do about record absences?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The pandemic disrupted schooling everywhere. But since then record numbers of children have not returned to regular schooling. Data from the Department for Education show that persistent absence - missing roughly seven days a term - is now at a record high. So is this a blip affecting a Covid cohort or a worrying trend toward a breakdown in the social contract between society and school?
David Aaronovitch talks to:
Branwen Jeffreys, BBC’s Education Editor Katie Beynon, Statistician at FFT Education Datalab Sam Freedman, Senior fellow at the Institute for Government Emily Hunt, Associate Director Social Mobility and Vulnerable Learners at the Education Institute Policy
Produced by: Kirsteen Knight, Sam Haque and Claire Bowes Edited by: Richard Vadon Sound engineer: Rod Farquhar Production co-ordinator: Debbie Richford and Sophie Hill.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:08.8 | Earlier this year, former head teacher and children's commissioner Rachel D'Souza |
| 0:13.1 | said she wanted the government to work ferociously to tackle school absences in England. |
| 0:19.2 | The number of children missing school has apparently never been higher. |
| 0:23.7 | With attendance closely linked to attainment, |
| 0:26.0 | many are worried about a so-called lost post-pandemic generation. |
| 0:30.8 | Are they right to worry? |
| 0:32.5 | And what should we do about it? |
| 0:34.6 | Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 0:41.9 | Thank you. do about it. Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out. First, let's get an idea of the scale of the problem. |
| 0:45.5 | Earlier, the briefing room's Claire Bowes talked to the BBC's education editor, |
| 0:49.7 | Bramwin Jefferies. If you look at the most important part of pupil absence, which is persistence absence, |
| 0:58.5 | so that is children who are missing at least 10% of school. That's around seven days in each |
| 1:04.6 | academic term. If you look at the autumn term in 2019, which is the last term before the pandemic |
| 1:10.8 | hit, the persistent |
| 1:11.7 | absence across England was 13.1%. By autumn 2022, that was 24.2%. So we are seeing the most troubling |
| 1:23.0 | part of absence running at consistently twice the level it was before the pandemic. |
| 1:30.5 | This is not a marginal shift, it's seismic. |
| 1:33.4 | And what have teachers been telling you about the impact of these absences, |
| 1:37.5 | both on the school itself as well as those who are absent? |
| 1:42.2 | Coming out of the pandemic with this doubling in the rate of persistence |
| 1:47.3 | absence, which is an amount of time missed that is going to have a very significant, |
... |
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