Why are Schools so obsessed with Childrens attendance?

[Darren2134]

Last Month, a parent told me something that really unsettled me: their child had received a letter branding him a “persistent absentee”. The kicker? If his attendance improved by 5%, he’d be invited to a party.
Let that sink in. A 5-year-old—just starting school life—is being incentivised to “try harder” to attend. But this isn’t really about motivating the child, is it? It’s a covert attempt to pressure the parent—using the child’s disappointment as leverage. The message is: Get them in, or they’ll be left out.
But who are these so-called “persistent absentees”? Often, they’re the kids who’ve been sick repeatedly—maybe with covid or other bugs. They’re the ones with unstable home lives, whose families might be struggling with poverty or mental health. Maybe the child is deeply anxious, overwhelmed by the transition to school, or dealing with SEN.
What good is a party to a child who is unwell, exhausted, or afraid? A glittery invitation doesn’t cure illness. It doesn’t magic up a bus fare. It doesn’t suddenly make school a place where a child feels safe.
This isn’t motivation—it’s manipulation. It weaponises disappointment. And it risks making vulnerable children feel ashamed, excluded, and “less than” for things utterly beyond their control.
The way we talk about attendance needs to change. Education should be accessible—but for some children, 100% attendance is simply not realistic. We should be asking why a child is struggling to attend, not punishing them for it.
We need to move away from blame and shame. Instead of pushing attendance as the end goal, how about asking how we can support children who are struggling? What would it look like if schools were funded and resourced to genuinely include all children, even those who can't always make it through the gates?
Curious what others think. Has anyone else experienced this kind of thing?

That is disgraceful. There are many people working in schools who should be nowhere near children. It’s quite terrifying.

Your poor DS.

Thank you. This is exactly why I am angry.

Thank you for what teachers like you do to try to fill the gaps in this dysfunctional system.

It’s depressing that there are still so many schools with a toxic culture of trying to blame the parents and children when they must know, deep down, that they are the ones failing these children.

I’m sure as you say and as we’ve all acknowledged on the thread that there are some children who simply have awful parents (I was one myself). For these children it’s even more important that school is a sanctuary where they feel safe and accepted and belong so I’d suggest that things like excluding them from treats for high attendance rates (which a primary school child will have no control over so they are being punished for their irresponsible parent’s behaviour as well as having to ensure an abusive and/ or neglectful home environment) will simply make them feel rejected at school as well as at home, so they feel they are unwanted everywhere. That’s extremely damaging. As is punishing a child for being in hospital or seriously ill or having SEN that the school is failing to support adequately, or for attending a family funeral as a PP also described.

How can anybody who thinks this is acceptable be allowed to continue working in education with vulnerable minors? It’s actually quite shocking.

What the education system needs is a regulator with teeth that will enforce the law and levy fines of sufficient magnitude on Local Authorities, schools and individual staff for unlawful behaviour that the financial incentive for this behaviour is removed; remove professional qualifications and bar people from further work with children for life by ensuring it shows up on DBS checks; and in serious cases impose prison sentences. This isn’t outlandish: it is what happens in every other regulated sector and profession. Once the law is properly enforced like in other sectors then there won’t be such variance between “good” and terrible schools because those that behave in this manner will not continue to operate.

Meanwhile the education budget needs to be increased significantly and the exact opposite of the approach proposed by the current clueless Education Secretary needs to be adopted. One size fits all does not work. We need a far wider variety of schools that cater for different children’s needs appropriately.

Tracking and investigating poor attendance is important for safeguarding, not for reward and punishment. Attendance can obviously affect educational attainment, but the statistics on this are naturally based on national averages, not on individual students. An otherwise able, well-supported child is unlikely to get poorer outcomes in thrir GCSEs just because they have missed a few more school days in, say, Y8 or 9 than would be ideal. And yet this is what they are told.

Secondary schools show these statistics to kids in an effort to scare them into dragging themselves into school when unwell (passing on their germs to everyone else) to make their attendance figures look better. In reality, the kids and families who genuinely are taking time off school for bad reasons are the ones least likely to take any notice of either the certificates or the scary stats.

And when it is the school itself that is creating the safeguarding issue, what then?

The response seems to be “sling mud at the parent and hope it sticks”, for having had the audacity to protect their child’s mental and/ or physical health.

Yes, some schools are awful and it sounds like you were treated abominably. But obviously there are cases (including some tragic and very well-publicised ones) which demonstrate what can happen when concerns about attendance are not followed up.

Not a teacher, just a TA.

The issue the system is massively failing and rotten from the top. There’s no will , or investment, or real engagement. All they have and do is tick box policies about inclusion, and no child left behind and targets about attendance and achievement. All the while external support services have been cut to the bone or dismantled, SEN schools and placements have been shut down, there are thousands of kids who don’t actually fit anywhere, the number of kids with SENDs is increasing and so on. However the expectations get higher and higher with no consideration of what it takes or individual children’s needs and here’s a PowerPoint as “support”. If it’s not working then you’re not trying hard enough, or engaging enough , or nurturing enough , or strict enough, or consistent enough . It automatically pits parents and schools against each other. You know , teachers are lazy ,sadistic, whingebags that only care about results. Parents are lazy, feckless and uneducated that only care about benefits and holidays. On and on it goes and nothing changes. Actually, things have changed…. For the worse.

LA’s are the worst, the fuck schools and parents up equally while putting the blame at their feet. My county doesn’t even screen/diagnose/recognise dyslexia ffs. You have to go private for an assessment, and whether the school accepts it or can offer support with it, it’s up to them but obviously no extra support or funding from the LA for it.

In “normal circumstances” a child won’t be missing school regularly. That’s the whole point. There has to be something very wrong for this to happen. However, the specific “something very wrong” varies immensely between a child being very seriously ill, the school being an inappropriate educational environment for the child or the school failing the child by not making adequate provision for their disabilities and therefore making regular attendance impossible for them, OR a problem at home.

In none of these cases will punishing the child who is already suffering and has no control over the situation improve things.

And to lump all of these cases together, which have extremely different causes and require completely different solutions, means that schools and Local Authorities actively make the situation worse in a large number of cases.

Until there is more professional, educated (the irony), evidence-based and less defensive engagement from schools with families, and some humility to admit when it is the school causing the problem rather than this determination to automatically blame parents regardless of the reason for the issue, none of these problems will be fixed.

As I said earlier in the thread, teachers and Local Authority staff should spend some time reading the Education Act 1989, the statutory SEND Code of Practice 2015, the SEND regulations 2014 and the Children and Families Act 2014 and reflect on whether they are complying with the requirements set out therein. They are (supposedly) the professionals in this situation so there is absolutely no excuse for unlawful behaviour. The behaviour towards children and parents is in direct breach of these laws and regulations in tens of thousands of cases, as the evidence from courts demonstrates with 99% of SEND tribunals finding in favour of the parent and finding schools and LAs have repeatedly broken the law once the evidence is reviewed by a judge who actually understands the law.

In no other profession would such unlawful, incompetent and negligent behaviour be tolerated and staff allowed to remain in post.

Compliance with the above laws and regulations would improve things substantially for children who are struggling to attend regularly whether than be because of illness, SEND, or neglectful/ abusive parents.

Lumping them all together and making banal statements about how on average higher attendance correlates with better outcomes is idiotic, given that it is self-evident that those with higher attendance on average won’t be enduring any of the difficulties that most often result in low attendance. Thinking that bullying, threatening and insulting families - many of whom value education greatly and are being deliberately obstructed from accessing it for their children - is going to improve things for children rather than cause further deterioration in their relationships with schools is idiotic. Assuming that if a child has low attendance the parent is likely to be neglectful/ abusive/ irresponsible means that appropriate measures to support attendance in the specific circumstances won’t be taken. It is also - far too often - used as a convenient excuse for schools and LAs to deflect blame for them failing the child and refusing to do their jobs.

Thinking that punishing a child for being sick or disabled by excluding them from celebrations at school or heaping public praise on children who happen to be lucky enough not to be unwell or disabled - or, indeed, punishing them for the failings of their parents in the cases where neglectful/ abusive parents are the reason for low attendance - is hardly going to improve things for a child in any of those situations, is it?

I’m sure that those who do have neglectful/ abusive parents would chew off their own arm to have a loving family (speaking from personal experience of my own childhood), so making these children feel even more ashamed and rejected when they are at school - as though a small child can be punished into getting themselves to school alone - is hardly going to be effective in improving their attendance, wellbeing, or educational attainment, is it?

I agree entirely. The whole system is set up for children to fail and to cause animosity between parents and schools.

Schools receive “notional funding” of £6,000 per child in their general SEN budgets according to Local Authorities, but this money doesn’t really exist. Therefore, until a school is spending over £6,000 on additional provision for a child it is more cost-effective for them to deny a child’s needs exist than to put provision in place/ support an EHCP application. School budgets are wholly insufficient per child to educate children adequately even if there were NO children with SEN in mainstream schools.

Then, it is left to individual parents to enforce the law. If a child is off school for medical reasons LAs refuse (illegally) to provide educational provision outside school as others on this thread have also noted from their own experience. Parents are disparaged, have aspersions cast on them despite large amounts of medical evidence, schools refuse to communicate openly with home per the law, as do LAs. Gaslighting and false reports commence. Complaints are ignored or used to portray the parent as “difficult”.

If an EHCP application is made the LA will usually refuse to assess. If forced to do so by tribunal they usually illegally ignore much of the evidence submitted and have to be taken to tribunal again to force them to issue the EHCP. As you note, NHS services are a complete failure so often parents either get no help at all or have to pay for private treatment. Schools and LAs then try (again illegally) to ignore the reports from the private doctors that the parent has been forced to pay for. Even if an EHCP is eventually issued the LA will try to leave out as much provision from it as possible to try to minimise the support they have to pay for. The parent then has to take them to a third tribunal to get it amended. Due to the number of cases where LAs are breaking the law like this the wait for each tribunal can be 12-18 months meanwhile the child is being failed, traumatised, or often unable to attend school at all.

Then the LA produces a “funding package” to fund the EHCP. However, this bears no resemblance to the cost of actually implementing it. They advise schools not to do what the EHCP - a legal document - specifies they must do. The funding package they produced for my daughter would have meant the school paying her TA £3 per hour. The SENCO came out of her meeting with the LA about this in tears. The only way to get the funding package amended is to take the LA to judicial review.

Then they will oppose appropriate amendments to the EHCP (or even try to withdraw it) at every annual review, and oppose appropriate placements at every transition to the next stage of education e.g. moving from primary to secondary, necessitating another tribunal every time.

Meanwhile parents are left dealing with a child whose mental health and education has been thoroughly trashed for years on end, trying to put their child back together and support them, trying to juggle working to provide for them with them being unable to attend school for protracted periods, AND having to constantly fight these legal cases and pay for medical treatment (this has cost me many tens of thousands of pounds so far) meanwhile having mud slung at them accusing them of being bad parents. And, apparently, some posters here wonder why parents are “so irate” about the lazy assumption that low attendance rates are likely due to poor parenting. I’d like to see those posters do what I did and manage on two hours’ sleep per night for 3 months straight while caring for a distressed child, dealing with false reports to social services and threats of prosecution, and holding down a full time professional job and also caring for my other small child.

Parents follow the procedure and complain to the school. The school literally cannot do what it is legally required to do because the LA won’t fund it. But rather than being honest about this the automatic reaction is to demonise the parent and pretend they are being “demanding” or “unreasonable” for expecting compliance with the minimum legal requirements so that their children can access education.

The Government is complicit in this by continually underfunding education and their latest wheeze to try to pretend that if you simply withdraw all individualised support from disabled children and segregate them into a “unit” without subject specialists and where they will spend much of the day receiving minimal education at all then everything will be solved, and that somehow this counts as “inclusion”. Inclusion would be for there to be sufficient schools to cater for children with different and incompatible needs so that children can go to a school where they feel that they belong and actually attend lessons and learn properly.

Oh, and their little plan to deal with LAs’ SEND deficits through their “backstop” which involved letting LAs keep the deficit off balance sheet temporarily on the condition that the LAs involved cut their SEND spending further. How could the LAs do that? It’s not like they were spending any money on it that they weren’t forced to spend by law anyway (and even then only after protracted legal battles with parents trying to enforce the law so that their child can attend school)… so the only way to cut SEND spending was for these LAs to implement illegal and unwritten blanket policies to automatically decline ALL EHCP applications and fight them at EVERY stage of the process even when they KNOW the applications are valid and there is a stack of medical evidence, and they know that this refusal of the required support to attend school is causing immense and often lifelong harm to the children involved. It will be interesting to see what happens when these “backstop” arrangement expire next spring. I presume this is why the Education Secretary is now trying to rush out her plans to abolish proper support for disabled children in mainstream schools altogether before next Easter, with no proper consultation with anybody other than the LAs who are obviously in favour of this because it will be cheaper and they do not care about children at all.

Meanwhile, nobody wants to go into teaching because the salaries are far too low and so many schools have such toxic environments, and the system as it is set up cannot and will not ever work because it is not possible to cater for 30 children in one classroom with vastly different and often clashing needs and issues and provide anything close to an adequate education. Therefore, mainstream schools are failing even those children for whom the current system would be ok, if it wasn’t for all of the other children who should not be in that environment but are forced to go there under threat of prosecution of their parents or even the children being removed from the family by vindictive and stupid social workers.

Full responsibility for education needs to be removed from LAs and placed back with central Government so they are forced to fund education properly and be accountable if they do not rather than being able to blame the LAs that they are refusing to fund properly. LA staff simply are not qualified or capable of dealing with this. And a proper regulator needs putting in place. The reason this won’t happen is because the Government doesn’t want to pay for proper education, therefore the LAs can’t pay, therefore the schools can’t pay, therefore all children’s educations are damaged by this because schools can’t operate properly. Yet allegedly, it must be the parents’ fault according to some of the ignorant people on this thread. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic for children and their families.

Despite understanding all of the above, I think that the staff in LAs and schools are also aware of this so their behaviour towards parents - trying to demonise parents to deflect blame for the situation - is disgraceful and I don’t know how those who engage in this can look at themselves in the mirror or sleep at night.

TAs like you who endure all of this for a disgustingly low level of pay for a very important and highly skilled job deserve immense respect from everyone and I am so, so grateful to my daughter’s TA that she has now (finally!), without whom she would still be at home and excluded from having a normal childhood in which she can attend school with her friends.

Thank you for what you do.

Indeed.

And shouldn’t qualified professionals be able to distinguish between the different types of cases, particularly when stacks of medical evidence are available?

I will add @WhenYouSayNothingAtAll that most of my children’s class teachers have been excellent. It was actually the Head at my daughter’s school who caused all of the problems. And one TA who was absolutely horrendous towards her and traumatised her, but I believe under his instruction because he was determined to ignore all of the evidence from her doctors and deny the existence of her disabilities.

The sheer ignorance of some of these people is astonishing. We had the Head saying she isn’t autistic because she is highly intelligent and meeting academic targets set for children with half her IQ (it has been tested now because of the educational psychologist assessment for the EHCP and it is at a rarity level of around 1/100,000, weirdly actually it is identical to the IQ of my other child although they both have different struggles and abilities). So simultaneously her support needs would be denied because she is intelligent, yet they refuse to give her sufficiently challenging work because this might make her “anxious”, which trashes her self-esteem further, makes her more anxious and makes her not want to attend school because she isn’t learning anything.

I had the Head ask if I need help applying for benefits just because I’m a single mother even though I earn much more than he does. When my daughter became suicidal because of how she was treated at school and said she would jump out of her bedroom window if she had to go back and I reported it to the Head he asked me which floor my flat is on. Nothing wrong with living in a flat, or course, but why did he presume that we did? Because I’m a single parent. It was suggested that the cause of a child with hypermobility diagnosed by a paediatrician having frequent sprained ankles etc might be injuries inflicted deliberately by me even though many of these injuries took place at school during playtimes and PE.

He told social services that my children are deprived and I neglect them and “can’t be bothered to bring them to school”. I enjoyed showing the social worker who turned up here unannounced the photos of the holiday to IKOS from which we’d just returned. Sure, the issue is that “I can’t be bothered to send her to school”, despite the Head having ignored emails from me for months, him refusing to return phone calls from me or my children’s advocate and SENDIAS and him having told the SENCO not to respond to me (I have proof of this obtained via a subject access request). Not to mention the fact that my other child was still attending every day. Such prejudice and stereotyping, it disgraceful and makes me fear for the parents who may be just as loving and decent as me but not have the resources to fight these people and dispute their false accusations against the child’s parents. And when all of these false accusations were later disproved in court proceedings, there were NO CONSEQUENCES for these people and this person is still running a school. It genuinely would not happen in any other regulated profession and that needs to change.

When she could not attend the LA told me “the provision at school [NOTHING at that point in time] is effective because the Head says that it is, so if you don’t send her back we will issue legal proceedings”. I told them to go ahead, and sent them copies of all of the medical evidence and asked on what basis the Head Teacher is qualified to overrule neurodevelopmental paediatricians, SALT, OT, child psychologists, psychiatrists, physiotherapists, ENT etc… I said I’d welcome the opportunity for the Head to stand in court and explain himself and I was quite happy to do so. Mysteriously, later, they then wrote to say they were “not going to pursue” this court case. No apology. And of course, they made no provision for education for her while she was not able to attend school, in breach of the Education Act 1989.

I honestly wouldn’t have believed that this type of behaviour towards perfectly reasonable and decent parents goes on until I’d experienced it first hand, so I can understand why many parents who don’t have children with additional needs might read this with incredulity. But the TAs and teachers and LA staff etc who are reading this (as well as other parents who have experienced similar) know that it does and that my child’s case is far from an outlier: this type of behaviour is now commonplace in the education sector as the tribunal statistics and various studies have shown.

The only rule is there’s an exception to the rule. Don’t get angry and me, get angry at your shit school.

It isn’t an exception.

99% of SEND tribunals are won by parents. That statistic has been static at 98-99% for a number of years, evidencing systematic and deliberate illegal behaviour from schools and Local Authorities. It is evidenced that this is endemic across the country.

Don’t blame me for you commenting on topics of which you are quite clearly entirely ignorant.

To be fair, your is one of the worst cases I’ve heard of , and what I know of , in my eyes, was utterly crap. Absolutely shocking and horrendous behaviour towards you and your daughter. I honestly do see it from all sides. I’ll own up and say that the cases of truly crap parents is indeed minimal , and even there , some progress could be made with proper support or intervention. I’ll also own up and say that sometimes we can’t meet need. We just can’t. The LA often ignored that and we got the kid anyway because they need a school place and anything is better , even if completely unsuitable. Then the kid starts and we can’t meet need, they’re miserable, the parents are miserable and we’re miserable (because we care) , but we have to jump through hoops to SHOW we can’t meet need. We get stupid advice like “give him some blu tac” and “use a marble jar” and we have to be observed and document everything and give the frikking blu tac(even though the kid eats it!!) to show it’s not working. Then try this that and the other , either useless or unfeasible . We can’t day it doesn’t work, we have to SHOW it doesn’t. And when Mrs. Suzie Observer comes in and sees no blu tac ? Nevermind what else is in place , or what the behaviours are , we haven’t ticked the box because he didn’t have the blu tac, so start over again. By then we’re a year and a half in, everyone is exhausted and banging heads on the wall , and maybe , possibly, if lucky they agree a placement to the local SEN school , however the waiting list is another 2 years and that’s a “win”. It can just about be “manageable “ when relationships and trust between parents and school are good, when fraught? Well, you know exactly how It goes.

I have no explanations or excuses or different interpretations for anything that you wrote. I’m just really, really sorry you, and especially your daughter (as a very young, vulnerable child) have been through this.

However she was extremely “lucky” to have a strong(emotionally,mentally) ,determined, educated mother with some means . So many kids don’t and them and their parents get completely railroaded by the system in so many ways. It’s infuriating.

That’s also why the LA does things the way it does. It automatically excludes from the process any kids whose parents are too tired, too busy , not educated or informed enough, struggling with SENDs or their mental health themselves etc. Add in a school that’s even slightly dismissive and/or unhelpful, even if not maliciously so, and you get millions in savings. They do it , because it works. We see it. We see them. I promise you we do. Just not a lot we can do about it.

So when the exception is there wasn’t a need for tribunal, that’s pretty poor.

What?

Your comment is unintelligible.

Are you trying to say that it’s “pretty poor” that parents are “poor” because in 1% of disputes with schools the LA and school was found to have complied with the bare minimum legal requirements so this 1% of parents shouldn’t have raised a tribunal case? Rather than focusing on the 99% of cases where the judge finds that the LA and school have broken the law and failed to meet their minimum legal responsibilities to the child?

When stacks of medical evidence are available, yes. Otherwise it's presumably not always easy at all.

Slithy - your personal situation is obviously awful. But the OP asked WHY schools care about attendance. People have repeatedly explained that it is because better attendance = better attainment and there may be safeguarding concerns.

Your personal situation isn’t really relevant. We all know that there are a range of causes of low attendance and different strategies are needed in different cases. You are getting angry with the wrong people and taking general comments personally.

If we can’t even discuss attendance without people like you assuming that you are being ‘got at’ ‘victimised’ or whatever then were are failing a large group of children. Most schools work with parents to help support attendance, if your school is crap take it with them. Not people who might actually have more experience of a wider range of issues than just yours.

No! Definitely not! Rereading it, it might come across like that. I mean it’s pretty poor that so many cases need to go to tribunal and the 99% rate highlights how badly children are being failed.

My son’s discharge letter was 6 pages alone. Mounds of evidence yet I still had to fight.

My son’s discharge letter was 6 pages alone. Mounds of evidence yet I still had to fight.

This used to piss me off when my DD was at secondary school. She had a lot of health issues - kidney problems, wisdom teeth removal,IBS, and her attendance wasn't brilliant but neither was it dreadful,about 92% at its lowest. I lost count of the times I had letters from the school about her poor attendance. When she was doing her A levels,a couple of her teachers said to me,and to her,that she had no chance of obtaining good grades with her attendance. In the event,she got 2 As and a B,went on to university and got a 2.1, which I think was pretty good considering. One of her friends who had 100 % attendance,got 2 Ds and and an E in her A levels, and a third at university. Which I think just goes to show that attendance isn't everything.

And yet when you look at the tribunal data, stacks of medical evidence are available in the vast majority of cases, not least because it is a requirement for evidence to be gathered during ECHP assessments.

Parents aren’t raising spurious and expensive tribunal cases for fun. It’s not a hobby.

Yet even in these most obvious cases that proceed all the way to tribunal - cases in which the child’s medical issues are very well-evidenced because the parents have the knowledge and means to ensure that they are - Local Authorities are still found to be in breach of the minimum legal requirements 99% of the time.

What is really sad is that this attempt at rationing provision via systematic illegal behaviour means that the children of parents who aren’t intelligent or well-educated, or don’t have the legal understanding to read and interpret law, or don’t have the means to fight these legal battles and obtain private treatment for their children due to the failing NHS - i.e. those who actually do have struggles in their home life as well as a school that is trashing their education - are the least likely to get the help that they need, compounding this disadvantage.

I was one of those children with nobody to fight for me. It is a miracle I survived at all.

I will fight as many battles as I have to for my children to get access to education and healthcare and I don’t care what any of these so-called professionals say about me. I can disprove it all. Others are too frightened and intimidated by the behaviour I have outlined to continue to advocate for their children, or don’t have the means to do so, or simply don’t know how to do so.

Like I said, I don’t know how the so-called professionals involved sleep at night.

Ah, thank you for clarifying. Sorry that I misunderstood your post. There have been so many bonkers posts here that it’s hard to tell if even the most outrageous sounding thing might be serious! My apologies for getting the wrong end of the stick.

Whilst I think attendance is important, I think schools have gone too far with some of the things you mention.

My DC1 had 100% attendance across reception and Y1 (complete fluke, she just happens to not be a sickly kid) save for when school cancelled the flu vaccines when ofsted announced they were coming. I was annoyed because I felt they were prioritising the inspection over a public health issue. Consequently none of the kids in KS1 had a flu vaccine and in December they basically all got sick. Mine missed a whole week and the fortnight before Christmas there were on average about 4 kids out of 30 in the class. I did chuckle to myself because it was entirely of the schools own making and their precious attendance stats were basically screwed for the rest of the year.