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?

Schools care because they know that higher attendance leads to better outcomes. The government cares because it knows that higher attendance leads to better outcomes.

The number of children with low attendance because of genuine medical reasons is a small proportion of the number with low attendance. An attendance rate of 80% is a day off a week - hugely limiting progress. There is also a difference between missing 3 weeks with eg flu (attendance would be 93%) and regularly missing a day or two - the latter is much more disruptive.

Unfortunately now the majority of low attendance and is enabled by parents - that does NOT mean that parents of children who have a genuine reason are being criticised. Unfortunately no parents admit that they are in the enabling category and tend to be very defensive. But keeping a child at home because they are tired or have a minor cold is generally not a good idea. If attendance is 80% it means that the child has missed over 200 lessons in a year.

its so important that school isn’t seen as optional or negotiable by the child. The pattern is so familiar - child is allowed to stay at home because they are worried about something (rather than alerting school immediately) and then it’s even harder to come in the next day, they are more distressed and allowed another day off etc.

If your child is frequently ill or exhausted don’t just keep that at home - seek medical advice about the cause of their exhaustion or repeated illness or send them to school.

I think schools do want dc to be happy at school and enjoy it. They do resort to pester power to get dc to tell parents they do want to go to school! They want to break the cycle of dc and parents being ambivalent. However they need to work with parents too. The dc cannot change chaotic parents easily. Some ambivalent parents might come round to school but we know lots of parents now see school as optional - opt in when it suits. Later on they will have dc who don’t keep jobs and have no resilience. Schools are correct to use various means to encourage attendance.

There were no medical reasons for my child not being in school for over 50% of primary school.

Quite apart from that how does telling a 5 year old they are going to miss the party improve anything. I suppose people imagine an upset child will suddenly make the parent think oh I must change my attitude, I've been neglecting my child but the upset about the party is going to change all that I would think the child is just as likely to be told to shut up moaning

that’s so ridiculous - it’s laughable. My son has asthma and was hospitalised a number of times last year. I just talk to him and say that there is nothing we can do about it - it’s unfair that he has asthma but it’s out of our control. It has serious impact on my job but again, it’s out of my control.

That's all great but where does a five year old missing a party through no fault of their own fit in?

But that definitely is in the control of the school. You, the school, the doctors can't magic away his asthma but the school could definitely let him go on the bouncy castle, party or whatever.

I didn’t say that parties for high attendees were a good idea. I don’t think they are.

It’s very tricky. Children DO need to understand that there are consequences to not coming to school, it’s obviously really tough to hear that if a child is ill, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true nor that we shouldn’t say it to those who have frequent duvet days. I always say ‘obviously if you are very ill, being sick or have a temperature you can’t come to school but it’s really important your attendance is as high as possible for you, it’s better to go even if you are a bit tired or have a normal cold than staying at home and having to catch up everything you’ve missed and missing what the teacher said or practicals.’

Schools care because they know that higher attendance leads to better outcomes.
The government cares because it knows that higher attendance leads to better outcomes.

per my earlier post, this is a generalisation that isn’t applicable in all cases. In my daughter’s case the higher outcome” was for her not to remain suicidal (as the school had made her), and she was learning nothing at school anyway because the work is far too easy for her. In my own case I achieved straight As with 12% attendance. Your comments are oversimplified generalisations to the extent that in many cases they are completely incorrect.

The number of children with low attendance because of genuine medical reasons is a small proportion of the number with low attendance.

Where’s your evidence for this? Any statistics gathered are not reliable because schools and Local Authorities frequently deny the existence of medical issues and SEN. They are still doing this to both of my children despite them having diagnoses many years ago.

An attendance rate of 80% is a day off a week - hugely limiting progress.

It would only “limit progress” if the school was providing an appropriate learning environment for that child in the first place. Often the school isn’t doing so.

There is also a difference between missing 3 weeks with eg flu (attendance would be 93%) and regularly missing a day or two - the latter is much more disruptive.

In that case why do they fine parents for occasional absences in one block for holidays or a family funeral etc?

Unfortunately now the majority of low attendance and is enabled by parents - that does NOT mean that parents of children who have a genuine reason are being criticised. Unfortunately no parents admit that they are in the enabling category and tend to be very defensive. But keeping a child at home because they are tired or have a minor cold is generally not a good idea. If attendance is 80% it means that the child has missed over 200 lessons in a year.

This is again victim blaming of the parents who have to pick up the pieces when inadequate provision makes it impossible for a child to sustain attendance. There is a very noticeable pattern of schools and Local Authorities wanting to demonise parents to deflect the blame for their own failings.

Many children become exhausted because there isn’t appropriate support and provision in place to meet their needs adequately. To dismiss this as “tiredness” is another attempt to minimise the problems with the school environment and deflect blame onto families.

And anybody sending a child with a virus into school is perpetuating many children being absent, especially in winter. If people are unwell and infectious they should not be passing that on to others deliberately, that’s immensely selfish.

its so important that school isn’t seen as optional or negotiable by the child. The pattern is so familiar - child is allowed to stay at home because they are worried about something (rather than alerting school immediately) and then it’s even harder to come in the next day, they are more distressed and allowed another day off etc.

And now trying to victim blame the children, implying that those who can’t cope with an unsuitable school environment are somehow deliberately manipulating the situation and trying to “negotiate” not to go. Many, many children are desperate to be able to attend and be included and learn but are unable to because the school environment is not possible for them to endure sustainably, let alone conducive to learning.

“Alerting the school” does little good. It’s like bashing your head on a wall. Parents are gaslit and blamed and medical reports are ignored with impunity.

If your child is frequently ill or exhausted don’t just keep that at home - seek medical advice about the cause of their exhaustion or repeated illness or send them to school.

Sending a child who is mentally or physically unwell into school is irresponsible if the school does not have appropriate provision in place to meet their needs. “Seek medical advice”! It’s just laughable. My children have reports from consultant neurodevelopmental paediatricians, psychiatrists, SALT, Occupational Therapy, physiotherapists, child psychologists, educational psychologists. Their school is still failing them. Perhaps save your admonishment for the Local Authorities and schools that routine ignore the medical evidence available and refuse to comply with their legal and statutory duties.

If the schoolwork is "too easy" for your dd and attendance is so unimportant why not just home school her?

I’m a lone parent and somebody needs to pay the mortgage, and the nannies that my children require when they are not at school and I’m working, as they cannot do group childcare. And their medical bills and operations almost all of which I have had to fund privately due to the failing NHS.

Part of being a parent is providing for them financially and sadly I’ve not yet developed a cloning machine so that I can work and be their teacher simultaneously. I do, however, pay a lot of tax and it’s therefore not unreasonable to expect that some of that will be used to provide appropriate education for them, per the law.

This would also benefit other taxpayers since they are both gifted and talented and likely to become very high taxpayers themselves if they are given appropriate access to an educational environment that doesn’t completely destroy their mental health during their crucial years of development.

Quite. Learn their kids stuff. 😐

@ghostofblueberrychasewhile my daughter was unable to attend school for over a term I did homeschool her. However, this meant doing that during the day and my full time job at night and sleeping for only two hours per day for three months until she could return to school safely. I am sure you can see why it isn’t sustainable for me to sleep for only two hours per day in perpetuity because I am actually a human being, so “just” homeschool her is not an immensely helpful suggestion.

I also did not state that “attendance is unimportant”.
My children want to attend school. I want them to attend school. It is their legal right to attend school, which is often denied to them.

The issue is that schools and Local Authorities refuse to provide an appropriate educational environment that children like mine can access sustainably and are therefore preventing them from having high attendance rates and causing them immense harm psychologically and educationally. They ignore all of the medical reports which state clearly what is required for them to meet their minimum legal and statutory obligations to provide an adequate (not good, but adequate!) education to my children and have even attempted to deflect blame onto me, as the parent, for the education system’s failings: threatening to prosecute me for not sending a child whom they made suicidal into school without any measures being taken to prevent this happening again, and even sending a very confused social worker here - to try to bully and intimidate me into sending her back with no support to make this safe - who thought she was in the wrong place and wrote a scathing response to the school about not wasting her time with spurious reports.

But sure, you think I should “just” homeschool them despite me not being a teacher and - shockingly - having a full time job of my own to do and paying large amounts of tax which is supposedly meant to fund basic services like children being able to access education: a basic human right set out in international law and UK law.

As I said no parent ever admits that they are enabling low attendance. You don’t need to take my general comments as targeted at your dc, as presumably you are not one of these parents. It is a fact that, in general, higher attendance leads to better outcome. That doesn’t mean that is the case for every child (although maybe they would have done even better with higher attendance).
parents who do enable low attendance are not victims, they may well believe they are doing the right thing. That doesn’t mean that they are.

The point is that such generalisations are inaccurate in many cases because these children are outliers by definition with disparate reasons for their low attendance so a targeted, individual approach needs to be taken to improve things. One-size-fits-all has manifested failed, yet we have a clueless Education Secretary determined to double down on this failed approach, it seems.

By making such generalisations you ARE lumping children like mine into this category and implying that they will “fail”. And you conveniently avoid the issue of the reasons why many children are unable to attend school sustainably and therefore also fail to provide any sensible solutions to address this problem. Given the reasons are disparate the appropriate solutions needs to be based on the individual child’s difficulties and rectifying their specific barriers to attendance, not telling them they will “fail” if they can’t comply with what is - in many cases - an impossible demand because of failings in schools.

Attempting to address this by demonising the parents and children won’t resolve the issue: schools need to address the problems with schools that make it impossible for many children to access education, rather than continually trying to deflect blame onto families.

I can tell you that it wasn’t from personal preference that I had my small child made suicidal and had to home school her for 3 months to safeguard her and put her back together, dealing with her distress, dealing with the threats from these imbeciles, and having to do my actual work at night so barely sleep. Meanwhile the school and Local Authority refused even to have a one hour meeting with me or her doctors or her advocate even to discuss solutions to enable her to return safely. They broke the law and ignored their legal and statutory duties to her with no consequences.

I don’t know how these people sleep at night, but gaslighting parents with the pretence that this kind of situation is because of a problem with the parents’ attitude to education is disgraceful given that it is well-evidenced that similar situations are commonplace throughout the country.

I would suggest schools need to take a long, hard look at themselves and consider whether they are “doing the right thing” before criticising families.

Complying with the minimum legal and statutory requirements per the Education Act 1989, Children and Families Act 2014, Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014, Statutory SEND Code of Practice 2015, and the minimum professional standards for their profession set out by the Teacher Regulation Authority, would be a good place to start.

Many children suffer greatly by being forced to have low attendance, in breach of their legal rights. Schools frequently make it impossible for them to attend even though they desperately want to do so.

What are schools doing about this to ensure they comply with their legal and statutory duties? 99% of SEND tribunals are won by parents demonstrating deliberate and systematic inlawful behaviour by schools and Local Authorities who are failing children deliberately and systematically. It’s not some kind of misunderstanding or occasional “mistake” or “error”: it’s systematic and widespread throughout the country. Individual parents have to enforce the law. Unlike any other industry or sector the regulator does not do so, nor do tribunals have the power to impose any fines or consequences or prison sentences or remove professional qualifications from those involved once the wrongdoing is legally proved, as they would in other professions (law, finance, medicine).

Pretending it is the parents who are to blame is laughable.

There are crap schools and there are crap parents. In my experience , the worst outcomes for kids happen when you get a mix of both.

I agree. However, there will always be crap parents - nothing can be done to prevent that - whereas it is entirely preventable that crap schools are allowed to continue to exist.

If a functional education system was implemented with appropriate regulation and enforcement ensuring that crap schools and illegal behaviour from Local Authorities were no longer tolerated, then no child would have to suffer both a crap school and crap parents and the worst outcomes where children are failed by both would be a rarity, meanwhile children with good parents wouldn’t have their health and educations destroyed by crap schools despite parents’ best efforts to support their children’s educations and to hold these appalling and incompetent teachers and Local Authority staff to account for the deliberate and unlawful harm they cause to children.

Exactly. The school absolutely has a choice.

My son missed most of Year 3 and only had some Year 4 after Easter. Year 5 will hopefully be better but it will definitely be under 97%.

His school wouldn't dream of excluding him from any stupid attendance rewards (they don't do them anyway) or sending an attendance letter home or holding a meeting about his attendance because they know it's for medical reasons. It would either be punishing a child for having medical issues or wasting everyone's time with letters and attendance meetings.

My SIL (husband's sister) had one of those letters and was horrified. Her dd's attendance had dropped below 90% which is equivalent to a morning or afternoon every week.

Niece is not unwell, no more so than other kids. But she just needed to say "I have a sore tummy" and her mother would say she didn't need to go to school. Or she would when other kids were off for 2 days with a cold/bug, she'd be off the whole week. Every little sniffle would be strung out far too long and even things like a routine dentist or GP appointment would mean a whole day off school - you can't possibly expect her to go back after being at the dentist! SIL also does not think going to school, getting an education and passing your exams is that important.

Slithy - it is simply a fact that in general children with low attendance have less good outcomes.

There is no need for you to take this fact personally and you don’t need to justify yourself to me. Presumably you would prefer that your child did have higher attendance? Schools vary, I only have experience of pretty good schools - we’ve been fortunate. When my dc had long covid and missed 8 weeks of school they were very supportive, no pressure and we worked together to plan a flexible staggered return. DC had to push through some tricky days and it was very stressful despite school being supportive. I’m sorry to hear that your school has not been supportive.

Your own experience of a child with low attendance and an unhelpful school still doesn’t mean that there isn’t a substantial group of children whose parents are enabling the low attendance- schools need to be able to help these children and other parents getting defensive about their own situation makes it even harder to address a really tricky problem. As I said previously all parents think or say that their reasons for low attendance are valid - sadly they aren’t all. Some parents really do let their kids miss school for very trivial reasons and some don’t even care if they go in at all! Stating this is NOT criticising parents of kids with serious medical issues.

Have you tried getting up earlier and if it didnt help have you told the school you need help

And what “help” exactly do you think a school would provide that magics away the child’s disability and how incompatible it is with the rigid school environment and schedule?

I have addressed your first point twice already. The entire point is that you make such generalisations without recognising the enormous variance amongst the children who struggle with regular attendance which will be for a wide variety of vastly different reasons therefore the appropriate remedy and expected outcomes for them - and indeed whether forcing them into that environment will do more harm than good - will also be wildly different.

By definition the children who struggle most with attendance are the outliers so applying statistics from the general population of children to one of them as an individual and stating that X approach will work for all children who struggle to attend school is nonsense.

Furthermore, it shows a misunderstand of correlation vs causation. As pointed out, many children who struggle to attend regularly have SEND. Others have a chaotic family life or severe medical issues so miss much school due to being in hospital etc. Of course - given the appalling, discriminatory and unlawful refusal of the legally required SEND provision by schools and Local Authorities across the country causing immense trauma to children, or impoverished/ abusive backgrounds which prevent children having a normal childhood, or being so unwell they are fighting for their basic health and have less capacity to learn - such children are likely to underperform compared to peers who suffer none of these issues.

This does not mean that their lower performance is because of their lower attendance, especially not in all cases which by making these oversimplified generalisations you imply to be the case.

It seems that those designing education and schools policy could do with a basic grounding in mathematics and statistics, child development, and logic inference so that they become capable of implementing anything vaguely resembling functional policies.

As I said all parents say their reasons for letting their children miss school are valid - sadly they aren’t at all.

Yet another blanket generalisation when in fact the data shows that in many cases the reasons ARE completely valid. What evidence do you have that they “aren’t [valid] at all” i.e. ever? You alternate between these disgraceful comments blaming parents in all cases and then saying “oh, but we didn’t mean you…”. Well sorry, many of us have seen this nonsense and deflection in action and undeniable data shows it is rife across the country - again, 99% of SEND tribunals are won by parents so when parents and a school disagree a court finds the school is legally wrong in 99% of cases. Therefore, if there is a dispute between a parent and school about the provision a child needs to attend it’s an almost certain assumption that the school is wrong, not the parent.

In terms of my comments above in response to your first point, the first case I mentioned (inappropriate provision for children with SEND preventing high attendance rates) is 100% the fault of schools and Local Authorities so they should be fixing this before slinging mud at anyone else.

The second case is not something soluble by schools because there will always be some useless and irresponsible and/ or abusive parents but schools can try to support the children as best they can so they at least have a supportive environment at school if not at home and want to attend.

The third case often involves LAs breaching their legal duty to provide a full time education to children who are unable to attend school for medical reasons and make appropriate provision for them so that they are able to learn while off school and return without delay.

In all of these examples, therefore, it’s quite clear that very different approaches are required to address the issue and this means schools communicating openly with families, and that the most obvious steps that can be taken to improve things (because sadly you will never eradicate the feckless parents in the second case) would be for schools and Local Authorities to do their jobs properly and comply with the law. Then, perhaps, fewer children with any of these very different problems would achieve lower than average results. Lumping them all together and pretending the parents just “don’t care about education” or “don’t want to send them” is damaging and false and absurd.

Slinging mud at parents because your profession is so incompetent that you’re seemingly incapable of accommodating anybody who isn’t “average” is a shameful failure and won’t wash, I’m afraid. Try working in any properly regulated profession and blaming the customer/ client/ patient for your failure to comply with the legal and statutory requirements of your profession and you’ll rightly get your arse handed to you with a large personal fine, removal if professional qualifications and - in cases if repeated or serious and harmful or deliberate breaches of the law - a prison sentence, and rightfully so.

The sheer audacity of trying to blame those using a service for its inadequacies is quite shocking and completely unacceptable, particularly where vulnerable minors are involved and the harm being caused by this incompetence is lifelong in many cases.

And no, @Sandyshandy, I absolutely don’t have to “justify myself to you”. That is not what I’m doing. I am trying to get you to see why the claims you have made have no statistical validity to apply to any individual and that the type of simplistic, mathematically illiterate and absurd generalisations you have made are driving the appalling policies that cause great harm to the health and education of tens of thousands of children. Attempting to deflect blame for this onto parents is unacceptable and, frankly, insulting to people who go through absolute hell because of the incompetence of those who work in the education sector.