Yes, it is if you look at the statistics in the statistically validated academic research. Over 90% of cases of children with poor attendance records or children who end up out of school entirely relate to children with neurodiversity - the vast majority of them diagnosed as autistic - for whom the state school system as currently designed is completely inappropriate. Local Authorities/ the DfE know that this is a fact, as has repeatedly been proved, yet continue to refuse to provide appropriate educational environments for these children, traumatise the children and gaslight/ blame/ threaten their parents.
This is by FAR the main factor in poor attendance rates nationally and is an absolute scandal: a systemic failing of a significant minority of children which is known and yet is deliberately continued with no suitable schools provided for these children, instead knowingly subjecting them to immense and lifelong mental health damage and, in many cases, ruining their life chances and any prospect of them reaching their potential.
All other factors influencing poor attendance are either unavoidable (e.g. children who are genuinely ill and should not be at school), or insignificant distractions (by magnitude) e.g. parents taking their children on holidays or the vanishingly small - and that IS what they are, statistically - proportion of parents who simply “can’t be bothered to send their children to school”; clearly such cases will exist but they categorically are not anywhere close to being the primary cause of the poor attendance rates nationally and therefore should not be where efforts and resources are directed before solutions are put in place to address the issue which has been proved to be by far the largest cause of absences, per multiple pieces of robust and statistically validated research on the topic.
Therefore, bullying perfectly sensible parents because they have kept unwell children with infectious diseases off school (rightly), shaming children, telling children not being ill is “an achievement”, or making children feel like they have somehow failed because they were ill and their parents made the responsible choice to keep them at home while sick, is not only inappropriate but will also do nothing significant to improve overall school attendance rates because it is not the primary cause of poor attendance in the first place. In fact, as any credible epidemiologist would tell you, it is actually extremely counterproductive to have such policies because encouraging/ coercing/ normalising sending infectious children into school quite obviously increases the overall number of sick days of both children and members of school staff.
This is classic “busy work”; a futile (and actually self-sabotaging) attempt to try to make it look like they are “doing something” about “the problem” when in fact it is misdirection because by far the primary cause of poor school attendance is not responsible parents keeping sick children at home or taking them to medical appointments: this is a distraction from the underlying cause that needs to be addressed, and a deliberate distraction designed to externalise the blame onto families because schools, Local Authorities and the DfE don’t want to deal with the actual problem because it is entirely their responsibility to fix and outwith the control of parents. The primary cause of high school absence rates - causing levels of absence orders of magnitude higher than any other factor or even all other factors combined - is that the structure of the state school system is completely inappropriate and inaccessible for a large minority of pupils and that despite the DfE being fully aware of this it continually refuses to provide appropriate schools that these children CAN attend sustainably, despite the majority of them desperately wanting to do so and their parents also wanting this, in fact in many cases fighting these “authorities” that claim they want children to attend school for YEARS through courts to make it possible for their children to receive any education at all.
Poor attendance is associated with poor educational outcomes, as other posters have noted. So why is the primary cause of poor attendance by far being ignored, with parents who try to address these issues with schools and Local Authorities being gaslit and ignored and forced to fight protracted legal battles with Local Authorities behaving illegally, sometimes for YEARS, simply to get them to comply with the basic requirements in the Education Act and the Human Rights Act for every child to be able to access education? Many of these children are left with no access to education for months or YEARS despite their parents’ best efforts to fight for this basic right for them.
Meanwhile we have idiots pretending that the school attendance problem is that Luke’s family took him out of school two days before the end of term so that they could afford a holiday, or that Emily stayed off for three days with a bad cold. And apparently Luke and Emily’s life chances will now be ruined. But it’s apparently fiiiiinnnnnneeee to leave many other children with no access to education at all for months or years on end.
I refer you back to the extremely large grey animal sitting in the room, making trumpeting sounds, spraying water and flapping its very large ears around trying to attract attention of the seemingly oblivious and self-righteous so-called “education professionals” in the hope that at some point the DfE, Local Authorities and teachers will acknowledge the poor grey animal’s existence.
Attendance rates will not improve significantly until these “professionals” and “authorities” stop expressing faux concern and trying to displace blame onto families and actually address the underlying cause of the vast majority of cases of low attendance.
Don’t hold your breath.