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Missing Lessons: Why School Absence Is Still High, and Who Pays the Price

Writer: Dr Joan Madia
Dr Joan Madia
4 hours ago
8 min read

Several years after pandemic closures ended, schools in England are still losing far more days to absence than they did before 2020. In 2024/25, 18.1% of pupils were persistently absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of possible school sessions, compared with 10.9% in 2018/19. Although attendance has improved since the immediate post-pandemic period, the proportion of pupils missing substantial amounts of school remains considerably higher than before the pandemic.

 

School absence is often discussed as a question of discipline or parental responsibility, but the evidence points to a more complex picture. Illness accounts for nearly half of all recorded absence, while poor wellbeing, special educational needs and socioeconomic disadvantage also play important roles. These challenges are not evenly distributed: pupils eligible for free school meals are more than two and a half times as likely to be persistently absent as their peers. The consequences can extend well beyond the classroom, with higher absence associated with lower educational attainment and weaker employment outcomes later in life. Yet despite growing recognition of the problem, evidence about which interventions reliably improve attendance remains limited.


How Absence Is Measured

Official statistics count sessions, and a school day has two, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The overall absence rate is the share of possible sessions missed for any reason. A pupil is classed as persistently absent if they miss 10% or more of their possible sessions, which is roughly 19 days in a 190-day school year, and as severely absent if they miss half or more (DfE, 2025; DfE, 2026a).

The distinction matters because averages hide concentration. A small change in the overall rate can reflect a large number of pupils missing a great deal of school.


A Stubborn Gap with Pre-Pandemic Levels

Before the pandemic, in 2018/19, 4.7% of possible sessions were missed and 10.9% of pupils were persistently absent. By 2021/22 those figures had risen to 7.6% and 22.5%. They have fallen since, to 6.8% and 18.1% in 2024/25, but remain well above pre-pandemic levels (Figure 1). In 2024/25 about 1.34 million pupils were persistently absent (DfE, 2025; DfE, 2026a).


Figure 1. Overall and persistent absence in England, 2018/19 to 2024/25. State-funded schools, school census. No comparable full-year data are available for 2019/20 and 2020/21 because of pandemic closures. Sources: DfE (2025), DfE (2026a).
Figure 1. Overall and persistent absence in England, 2018/19 to 2024/25. State-funded schools, school census. No comparable full-year data are available for 2019/20 and 2020/21 because of pandemic closures. Sources: DfE (2025), DfE (2026a).

Severe absence tells a different story. It has kept rising: 2.39% of pupils, around 176,000, were severely absent in 2024/25, up from 2.30% a year earlier and from 0.85% in 2018/19, almost three times the pre-pandemic rate (DfE, 2026a). This suggests the overall improvement has not reached the pupils with the deepest difficulties.


Early data for 2025/26 point to a plateau. Across the autumn and spring terms, overall absence was 6.60%, almost unchanged from 6.63% a year earlier, and persistent absence edged down from 17.63% to 17.50% (DfE, 2026b). Daily attendance data for the full 2025/26 year, which are provisional estimates collected through a different system, put persistent absence at 19.05%, up 0.35 percentage points on the previous year (DfE, 2026c). The two sources differ in level and should not be compared directly, but both suggest that the post-pandemic recovery has slowed.


Absence also follows the school calendar. In 2024/25 the overall rate rose from 6.38% in the autumn term to 7.15% in the summer term, and persistent absence from 17.79% to 21.72% (DfE, 2026a).


What Lies Behind the Numbers

Illness remains the single largest recorded reason for absence. In 2024/25 it accounted for 3.22% of possible sessions, just under half of all absence (Figure 2). In the autumn and spring terms of 2025/26 it stood at 3.30%, lower than a year earlier but above the pre-pandemic level, which was typically below 3% (DfE, 2026a; DfE, 2026b). Unauthorised absence for other reasons was the next largest category at 1.56%, followed by unauthorised holidays at 0.48%. Since 2024/25 term-time holidays can no longer be authorised and new absence codes have been introduced, so recorded categories are not fully comparable with earlier years (DfE, 2026a).


Figure 2. Reasons for absence in England, 2024/25. Share of possible sessions missed, all state-funded schools. The remainder category is calculated as total absence (6.78%) minus the four reasons shown. Source: DfE (2026a).
Figure 2. Reasons for absence in England, 2024/25. Share of possible sessions missed, all state-funded schools. The remainder category is calculated as total absence (6.78%) minus the four reasons shown. Source: DfE (2026a).

Recorded reasons tell only part of the story. A July 2026 study by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), funded by the Nuffield Foundation, combined case studies in ten mainstream secondary schools with a survey of parents and carers. More than half of the parents surveyed (51%) identified poor wellbeing as a key factor behind rising absence. They linked it to mobile phone and social media use (66%), greater awareness of mental health symptoms (41%), difficulty accessing support services (37%) and bullying (35%). The researchers stress that the relationship runs both ways: poor wellbeing makes attending harder, and prolonged absence makes returning harder (NFER, 2026).

Special educational needs and mental health are central. The Education Policy Institute found that the largest pandemic-era increases in absence were among pupils with autism and with social, emotional and mental health needs, and that the number of pupils identified with the latter rose by 37% between autumn 2019 and autumn 2023 (EPI, 2024). Parliament's Education Committee has pointed to long waiting lists for children's mental health services, and to delays in support for pupils with special educational needs, as pressures that compound the problem (UK Parliament Education Committee, 2023).


Attitudes may also have shifted. Polling reported in the Centre for Social Justice's 2026 School Absence Tracker found some parents agreeing that the pandemic showed attending every day is not essential (CSJ, 2026). The size of this effect is hard to establish, and attitudes are difficult to separate from the health and practical barriers described above.


Who Is Most Affected

Absence is highly unequal. In 2025/26, around 34% of pupils eligible for free school meals were persistently absent, compared with about 13% of those who were not eligible. The rate was 37% among pupils with an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan, 29% among those receiving SEN support and 16% among pupils with no identified special educational need (Figure 3). Pupils with EHC plans are more than seven times as likely as pupils with no identified need to be severely absent (DfE, 2026b; DfE, 2026c).


Figure 3. Persistent absence by pupil group, England, 2025/26. Provisional estimates from daily attendance data, state-funded schools. The dashed line marks the rate for all pupils. FSM = free school meals; SEN = special educational needs; EHC = Education, Health and Care. Source: DfE (2026c).
Figure 3. Persistent absence by pupil group, England, 2025/26. Provisional estimates from daily attendance data, state-funded schools. The dashed line marks the rate for all pupils. FSM = free school meals; SEN = special educational needs; EHC = Education, Health and Care. Source: DfE (2026c).

Absence also rises with age and varies by place. In 2024/25 it was highest in Year 11, where 10.31% of sessions were missed and 27.22% of pupils were persistently absent. London had the lowest overall absence rate (6.29%), while the North East had the highest overall (7.17%) and persistent (19.37%) rates (DfE, 2026a).


One finding from the daily data has practical value. Among pupils who missed at least one day in the first week of the 2025/26 academic year, 59% went on to be persistently absent, rising to 72% among those eligible for free school meals. These are descriptive statistics and do not show that missing the first week causes later absence, since many of these pupils may already have been unwell or facing difficulties. They do suggest that the opening days of term could serve as an early warning signal for schools (DfE, 2026c).


Why It Matters

The link between absence and attainment is well documented. A Department for Education analysis of about 1.4 million pupils who took their GCSEs between 2017 and 2019 found that each additional day missed between Years 7 and 11 was associated with a lower Attainment 8 score, equivalent to roughly one GCSE grade for every 13 days of absence for a pupil with average prior absence. Applying earlier departmental estimates of the earnings returns to GCSE attainment, the authors calculated that a day of absence was associated with about £750 less in lifetime earnings, in present value terms and 2024 prices (DfE, 2025).


A separate analysis linking school and tax records for pupils who took their GCSEs in 2007 found that those who were persistently absent in Years 10 and 11 were 2.7 times as likely to be claiming benefits at age 28 and had markedly lower odds of sustained employment (DfE, 2025).


These figures need careful reading. The department is explicit that they are associations rather than proof of cause and effect. Children who miss more school often face other disadvantages, such as poor health, family difficulties or unmet needs, which also affect their grades and later earnings, and the department rates its own evidence at level 2 out of 5. Several international studies that use methods such as flu outbreaks and school strikes to isolate the effect of absence do find negative effects on attainment, although the estimates vary widely (DfE, 2025).


The costs are not only educational. Research from the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration East of England, published in 2025, found that prolonged school non-attendance can strain parents' relationships, raise stress and create financial pressure, particularly where children have additional needs (ARC East of England, 2025).


What Can Be Done?

Policy has moved towards earlier identification and clearer expectations. Since 2024/25 schools in England have been required to share daily attendance data with the Department for Education, statutory guidance has set out how attendance should be managed, and term-time holidays can no longer be authorised (DfE, 2026a; DfE, 2026c).


Whether these measures improve attendance, and for whom, is not yet clear. The Education Endowment Foundation's review of 72 studies found some promise in approaches built around parents, such as personalised letters or texts to the families of persistently absent pupils, and in responsive interventions that address the individual causes of absence. It rated the wider evidence as weak, and found too little evidence on approaches such as mentoring to draw conclusions (EEF, 2022).


The mix of causes suggests that enforcement alone is unlikely to be enough. Where absence reflects unmet health or educational needs, the NFER calls for family support, mental health services and other public services to be adequately resourced to work alongside schools (NFER, 2026). Different causes call for different responses, which in turn requires good information on why a pupil is absent.


There are trade-offs. Stricter enforcement may deter some absence, but it risks penalising families of children who are unwell or anxious. More support is costly and depends on services, such as child and adolescent mental health care, that are themselves under strain.


Conclusion

School absence in England has eased from its post-pandemic peak but remains far above pre-2020 levels, and the most severe cases are becoming more common. It is not only an education problem. Illness, mental health, special educational needs and poverty all sit behind the numbers, which is why it deserves attention from health policy as well as education policy.


The most useful questions may not be how to get every child into school by any means, but why particular children are missing school, and what support would make attending possible for them.


References

 
 
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