What is school attendance?

Attendance is simply whether a pupil was present when the register was taken. Schools in England take a register twice a day — once at the start of the morning and once during the afternoon. Each of those two moments is called a session.

An attendance rate is the share of sessions a pupil was present for, out of all the sessions they could have attended. Because attendance and absence are two sides of the same count, an attendance rate of 93.5% and an overall absence rate of 6.5% describe exactly the same thing.

Attendance is a legal duty for parents of children of compulsory school age. Schools record it in a standard way set out by the Department for Education, which is what makes national comparison possible.

What counts as a good attendance rate? →

What counts as absence?

A pupil is absent when they are on a school’s roll but not present for a session they were expected to attend. Every absent session is recorded against a reason code, and every reason is classified as either authorised or unauthorised.

Some codes describe a pupil who could not attend but is not treated as absent at all. If a school is closed by snow, or a local authority has not arranged the transport a pupil needs, those sessions sit outside the absence figures entirely. During 2020/21 and 2021/22 the same was true of sessions missed for COVID-19 reasons: they counted as possible sessions but were never counted as absence.

Pupils educated off-site through an approved arrangement, such as some alternative provision, are usually recorded as present at the main school. Absence in state-funded alternative provision is published as a separate series for that reason.

What is authorised absence?

Authorised absence is absence the school has agreed to, either in advance or after the event. The largest category by a wide margin is illness; others include medical and dental appointments, religious observance and study leave.

Authorised does not mean present, and it does not mean the absence had no effect on learning. It means a member of school staff accepted the explanation given, which is one reason authorised absence varies between otherwise similar schools.

Read the full guide to authorised and unauthorised absence →

What is unauthorised absence?

Unauthorised absence is absence without the school’s permission: term-time holidays the school did not agree to, arriving after the register has closed, absence where no reason has been given, and other unauthorised circumstances.

It is often read as a proxy for truancy, which it is not quite. A pupil arriving twenty minutes after the register closes is marked absent for the whole session.

Read the full guide to authorised and unauthorised absence →

What is persistent absence?

A pupil enrolment is persistently absent if it misses 10% or more of its possible sessions. The persistent absence rate is the share of enrolments that meet that threshold.

It counts pupils, not sessions, and it is defined in sessions rather than days — a pupil who misses one afternoon a week can cross the threshold without ever missing a full day. In an autumn-term release the threshold applies to that term’s possible sessions, not to a full year.

Read the full guide to persistent absence →

What is severe absence?

A pupil enrolment is severely absent if it misses 50% or more of its possible sessions — at least half of school. Severe absence is a subset of persistent absence: every severely absent pupil is also persistently absent.

Because the group is small, the rate moves in tenths of a percentage point while representing large numbers of children. This Explorer shows the counts alongside the rate for that reason.

Read the full guide to severe absence →

How is attendance measured?

Schools record attendance in their own systems and return pupil-level absence data to the Department for Education through the school census. The two core calculations are:

• Overall absence rate = sessions missed through absence ÷ possible sessions × 100.
• Persistent absence rate = enrolments missing 10% or more of possible sessions ÷ all enrolments × 100.

The unit throughout is the enrolment, not the child. Every rate in this Explorer is calculated from the published counts at the moment it is displayed, rather than stored pre-rounded.

Read the full guide to how attendance is calculated →

What does one session mean?

A session is half a school day. A standard school year has 190 days, so roughly 380 sessions; an autumn term is roughly 140 sessions depending on term dates.

Rates expressed “as a percentage of possible sessions” are therefore percentages of half-days, not of days and not of hours.

Read the full guide to how attendance is calculated →

Why might DfE attendance datasets give slightly different figures?

DfE publishes more than one view of attendance, and they answer slightly different questions.

• Pupil absence in schools in England — the accredited official statistics used throughout this Explorer. Built from the school census, covering pupils aged 5 to 15, published termly and annually in arrears.
• Pupil attendance in schools — a more timely series built from daily register data submitted automatically by school management systems. It appears within weeks rather than months, but figures can be revised as registers are updated, and its coverage and age range differ.

Differences also arise from the population counted (age range, school types, alternative provision), the period covered (a single term against a full year), and the treatment of codes that are not absence. Two figures that disagree are usually both right about different questions. Comparing them as though they were the same series is the mistake to avoid.

How should school-level absence statistics be interpreted?

Absence statistics should not be used in isolation to judge school quality. Rates can be affected by pupil characteristics, local circumstances and other factors that are outside a school’s control.

Three cautions are worth holding on to. Schools serve different intakes, and intake is strongly related to absence. Small schools produce volatile rates, because a handful of pupils can move the figure by a percentage point. And a school that admits pupils mid-year, including those already out of education elsewhere, inherits absence that accrued before they arrived.

This Explorer deliberately produces no overall score, ranking-as-judgement or rating for any school. It shows the published figures alongside relevant comparators and leaves the interpretation where it belongs.

What happened to attendance during and after COVID?

The pandemic broke the series in two ways. Schools were closed to most pupils for long periods in 2019/20 and 2020/21, and the recording rules changed: sessions missed for COVID-19 reasons counted as possible sessions in 2020/21 and 2021/22 but were never counted as absence.

DfE therefore advises caution when comparing 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021/22 with other years. Those periods are shaded on every time series in this Explorer.

The more durable change is what happened afterwards. Absence did not return to its pre-pandemic level once schools reopened. Overall absence and, more sharply, persistent absence settled well above where they had been through the 2010s, and have stayed there. The Trends view shows this directly, and the pre-pandemic comparison point on each headline card is 2019/20 for that reason.

Symbols and missing values

DfE uses a small set of conventions for values that are not a number. This Explorer preserves them rather than converting anything to zero.

A zero in this Explorer always means a genuine zero in the DfE data.