Children miss extra 4.7m school days as pandemic triggers attendance crisis

Telegraph

18-03-2025

Schoolchildren across Britain are missing an extra 4.7m days every term after the pandemic triggered a national attendance crisis, new analysis shows.
Children missed 11.5m days of school in the autumn term of 2023 – 67pc more than the 6.8m days lost in the same period before Covid hit in 2019, according to a new report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank and The Difference, an education charity.
The numbers represent a 'fundamental fracturing of society' which is hammering productivity and driving spiralling costs to the public purse, the report warned.
Children have increasingly missed school since the pandemic lockdowns, which disrupted the education system and reduced parental support for full-time schooling.
Alongside kids skipping school, expulsions have also surged by a third in a single year while the number of children in home education has jumped by more than a fifth.
Lost learning is a major threat to the UK economy as children lose the ability to build the skills needed to join the workforce at the same time Britain's economic inactivity crisis spirals out of control.
Previous analysis shows each child who is expelled from school costs the taxpayer an estimated £170,000 over their lifetime.
The number of young people who are not in education, employment or training (Neets) has jumped by nearly a quarter since the pandemic began to just under one million – the highest level since the end of 2013.
Britain's attendance crisis is closely interconnected with a boom in special educational needs that is crippling local authorities' finances.
Since 2015, the number of children with the highest level of special educational needs support plans has increased by 140pc.
Kiran Gill, an associate fellow at IPPR and the founder of The Difference, warned that the attendance crisis threatens Rachel Reeves's promises to grow the economy.
Ms Gill said: 'Our education system is failing the children who need it most. The consequences – rising mental health issues, youth violence and risks to national growth – should concern us all.
'This is the new frontier in education. Without more children in front of their teachers, we cannot raise attainment, improve employment, or give more children the safe, healthy childhood they deserve.'
For every child that is permanently excluded, IPPR calculates there are 10 more who are making 'invisible' exits from school, which includes being illegally banned from the school without a formal expulsion.
A third of these children go on to an 'unknown destination', meaning the Department for Education has no idea where or whether they are still being schooled.
The report's authors urged the Chancellor to invest £850m over the next five years to tackle school absence.
This would help half a million children and would pay for itself by 2030 by reducing the need for 35,000 costly Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCP), which help kids with learning difficulties get through school.
They also called for new laws to make sure children are monitored when they leave school.
School admissions policies should also be changed so that institutions take on more children from disadvantaged backgrounds, they added.
Efua Poku-Amanfo, a research fellow at IPPR, called for urgent action to tackle lost learning.
'Children can't learn if they are not in school or are in some other way lost from the classroom or unaccounted for. Since the pandemic, huge swathes of children have never returned, are being excluded or are mysteriously absent,' she said.
A Department for Education spokesan said:'This Government inherited a school system with a wide range of baked-in inequalities, and its clear absence is having a detrimental impact on children's learning and their future success.
'Through our landmark Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, we will improve data sharing across services and strengthen the safeguards around home education to stop children falling through the cracks in the system.
'Our Plan for Change sets out our relentless focus on making sure every child gets the best life chances, no matter their background, which is why we're establishing free breakfast clubs in every primary school, providing access to mental health support and making attendance one of the four core priorities of our school improvement teams.'