School Absence Rates Are Rising Again: What the Latest Figures Mean and When to Act

The headline numbers, in plain terms

The Department for Education published its latest pupil absence statistics on 23 October 2025, covering the autumn and spring terms of the 2024/25 academic year in England. The picture is genuinely mixed.

Overall absence across the two terms was 6.63% of possible sessions in 2024-25, down from 6.93% in the same period in 2023-24. Persistent absence (10%+ of sessions missed) fell to 17.63% in 2024-25, a drop from 19.23% the previous year. At the same time, severe absence (50%+ of sessions missed) rose to 2.26% in 2024-25, up from 2.14% in 2023-24.

In other words: things are slowly improving for the average child, but the most vulnerable group — those missing half or more of school — is growing.

The local picture in some areas is starker than the national average. In Sheffield, for example, 19.8 per cent of students in the area, or one in five, were persistently absent, meaning they missed 10 per cent or more of sessions. However, this is down from 21.4 per cent in 2023-24. Nationally, the Centre for Social Justice noted in its October absence tracker that with 1.4 million pupils – that is, one in five – missing more than one in ten days of school, absenteeism remains 56 per cent higher than the pre-pandemic norm.

For context, persistent absence was 10.53 per cent in 2018-19 — so although the figure is moving in the right direction, it is still well above where it sat before the pandemic.

What "persistent absence" actually means

The 10% threshold trips up a lot of parents because it sounds like a small number until you do the sums.

A school year in England has 190 days, split into morning and afternoon sessions (each session is half a day). Missing 10% of sessions means missing roughly 19 days across the year, or about one day a fortnight. That is the line at which the DfE — and your child's school — will class your child as persistently absent.

A few things follow from that:

• A bad winter of colds and a single family holiday in term time can put a primary-age child over the threshold without anyone noticing.
• Once a child crosses it, the school is required to take an active interest. That usually means a letter, a meeting, and sometimes referral to the local authority's attendance team.
• "Severe absence" — missing half of school or more — is a different category, and the one DfE is most worried about. Over 160,000 pupils were severely absent in Spring 2025, up by 167 per cent since 2019.

Why illness is still the biggest driver

The most common reason for absence has not changed. The most common reason for absence remains illness, accounting for 3.38% of possible sessions in the combined terms. That is more than half of all absence in the system.

Two things are worth knowing here. First, illness absence has come down from its post-pandemic peak but is still running above pre-pandemic levels. Second, heat-related disruption is now a regular feature of the summer term — DfE guidance to schools on managing hot weather was reissued ahead of the 2025 summer and again recently, reflecting how often heatwaves now affect attendance, PE timetables and, in some cases, full or partial closures.

For most families this matters because June and early July, which used to be a settled run-in to the summer holidays, are now more likely to involve disrupted days. That can tip a borderline attendance record over the 10% line without any single dramatic event.

When to be reassured, and when to act

Most parents who ask their school for their child's attendance figure get a number that looks worse than they expected. That is partly because half-day sessions inflate the count, and partly because one nasty week of flu can take a child from 98% to 92% very quickly.

A rough guide:

• 96% or above. Broadly the school average for a healthy child. No action needed.
• 90–95%. Worth keeping an eye on. A single bad illness or unavoidable appointment can push the figure down further. Avoid term-time holidays if you can.
• Below 90% (the persistent absence threshold). The school will already be tracking this. Ask for a meeting if one hasn't been offered. Find out which subjects are most affected and whether catch-up support is in place.
• Below 75%. Treat as urgent. At this level, gaps in learning compound quickly, especially in maths and modern languages, where each topic builds on the last.

The figure to watch is not the headline percentage on its own, but the pattern. A child who misses one day a fortnight, every fortnight, is in a very different position from one who had a fortnight off with glandular fever and has been in every day since.

What to do if your child's attendance is borderline

If your child's attendance is sitting in the 88–92% range and you are not sure whether to worry, a few practical steps help more than panicking does.

1. Ask the school for a breakdown. Most schools can show you authorised vs unauthorised absence, lateness, and the reasons logged. The picture often looks less alarming once you see it.
2. Identify the cause honestly. Illness, anxiety, friendship problems, sensory issues, and unidentified special educational needs all produce similar-looking attendance records but need very different responses.
3. Talk to the form tutor or head of year first, not the head. They see your child every day and will usually be the most useful contact.
4. If anxiety is involved, ask about the school's emotionally based school avoidance (EBSA) approach. Most secondary schools and many primaries now have one. Forcing a child through the gate every day rarely works on its own.
5. Address the academic gap separately from the attendance issue. A child who has missed three weeks of Year 9 maths needs that material re-taught, not just more time in lessons where the class has moved on. This is where targeted one-to-one tuition genuinely helps — not as a substitute for school, but as a way of stopping the gap from widening while attendance is rebuilt.

The wider context parents should know

The government's response so far has focused on data and early intervention. In December 2025, in its response to the consultation on improving support for children missing education, the DfE confirmed it will continue to run termly data collections on children missing education, and ministers have signalled they want better joining-up of records across education, health and social care.

Schools Week reported the DfE's own line on the figures: interventions on severe absence would "build over time" and "turning it around isn't going to happen overnight". That is probably the honest summary. The system is moving in the right direction on the broad measures but is still some distance from where it was in 2018/19, and the children at the sharpest end — those with EHCPs and those eligible for free school meals — are not yet seeing the benefit. FSM-eligible pupils saw an increase in severe absence from 3.93 per cent to 3.98 per cent, while kids on an education and health care plan had a severe absence rate of 7.3 per cent last year – up from 6.55 per cent the year before.

The short version

If your child's attendance is 96% or higher, the headlines about a national absence crisis are not about your family. If it is sitting between 90 and 95%, watch the trend rather than the number, and avoid avoidable absences in the summer term when heat disruption is likely. If it is below 90%, the school is already required to act — your job is to make sure that action is the right one for your child, and that the learning lost is being made up somewhere, by someone, before the gap becomes the reason for the next absence.