Improving Pupil Attendance at School

A report published today by John Dowdall CB, the Comptroller and Auditor General for Northern Ireland, examines what is being done by the Department of Education, the Education and Library Boards and schools to improve pupil attendance at school. In Northern Ireland, there are over 165,000 pupils enrolled in 911 primary schools and over 155,000 pupils enrolled in 233 secondary and grammar schools. Their absence from school may be for legitimate reasons, the most obvious being ill-health. Unauthorised absence, on the other hand, includes both pupils who are absent purely by their own initiative (“truanting”), and those whose absence is condoned by parents, for example for holidays during term time.

Key Findings

The report points out that:

• While overall absence statistics show that Northern Ireland schools perform favourably when compared with Great Britain, unauthorised absence levels in Northern Ireland schools are higher, for example, around twice the level recorded for England. At one extreme, the report found it to be as high as 11 per cent in two schools in the Belfast Board (paragraph 1.18);
• On any one day, nearly 5,000 pupils could be absent from Northern Ireland schools without a valid reason (paragraph 1.19);
• Annually, resources amounting to around £12 million are provided for these absent pupils. The Department has pointed out that it is inappropriate to attempt to quantify the cost of poor attendance in such monetary terms as the cost of educating a class remains the same irrespective of the number of pupils absent on any one day. It contends that the real cost of poor attendance is to be found in the consequences for the individual pupil of the lost learning opportunity later in life with poor employment prospects or in the resources required to sustain social policies to remediate poor educational outcomes for adults (paragraph 1.19);
• During 2002-03, 3,012 primary school pupils (1.8 per cent) and an alarming 8,732 post-primary pupils (5.6 per cent) were referred to the Boards’ Education Welfare Service (EWS) as persistent or chronic non-attenders (paragraph 1.21); and
• In the three years up to 2002-03 there was a 70 percent increase in EWS referrals among primary school pupils at Key Stage 1 (age 8) (paragraph 1.21).

Main Conclusions and Recommendations

What information is available on pupil attendance and how is it used? (Part 1)

The lack of appropriate systems for collecting and analysing data on unauthorised absence has meant that the Department, the Boards and schools have had difficulty in effectively identifying causes of absenteeism, applying approaches to address its causes and targeting resources. The report recommends that the Department and the Boards should take steps to ensure that the proposed networking of C2K – the administrative support system for schools - is completed as swiftly as possible in order to assist themselves and schools in monitoring levels and patterns of school absence (paragraph 1.12).

How effective are strategies in place to improve attendance and tackle absence? (Part 2)

The report considers that EWS needs to develop more its function as a source of expertise on strategy, procedures and data analysis. They need to monitor patterns and levels of absence in schools in order to be able to identify trends and to set targets for achieving improvements in attendance across the Boards, for specific schools or groups of schools. (paragraph 2.12).
The Department, Boards and schools have devised numerous measures to encourage good attendance and deal with poor attenders, many of which are innovative and pursued with vigour by committed staff. For example, the methods adopted by Corpus Christi College, in Belfast have been fruitful (paragraph 2.40). In many instances these measures seemed to be working well and people had high hopes of them. In others, the impact of the initiative was more patchy. In general, however, the report found that even where the view was that initiatives were successful in tackling absence, there was a lack of statistical evidence of improved attendance (paragraph 2.47).