Anti-truancy crusade fails to make an impact

The government has failed to cut truancy rates in England despite spending hundreds of millions of pounds on measures to reduce absence from school, according to a report released today.

Some 450,000 out of a total of 6.7 million state pupils are absent from school each day, though the vast majority of these absences are authorised for health reasons.

The Department for Education and Skills has spent ?885m since 1997 on measures to improve attendance, and the overall rate of absence has dropped from 7.6% to 6.7% of school days. But the rate of truancy has remained steady at around 0.7%.

In 2002 the department was set the target of cutting unauthorised absence by 10% - some 5,000 pupils - within two years, but by 2003/04 the rate was unchanged at 0.72%.

Pupils absent from school each day could fill 816 primary schools and 252 secondaries, and while absent the children miss out on education worth ?1.6bn a year, said the report by Whitehall spending watchdog the National Audit Office.

The NAO urged the DfES to work more closely with local authorities and schools to improve the effectiveness of initiatives to cut absence.

And it said more emphasis should be put on primary schools, as children who get used to skipping lessons in their first years of education tend to go on to become regular absentees.

More effort should be made to make sure that parents understand the importance of their children turning up for lessons early in their school careers, said the NAO.

"Negative parental attitudes to education are closely associated with absence and may also be more difficult to change once they become established," it explained.

Some education authorities have cut truancy by introducing electronic registers to check which children are in each lesson or by offering vocational training to non-academic youngsters who are bored by traditional subjects.

The DfES should help ensure that innovative schemes like these, which have been shown to be effective, are adopted more widely across the country, said the report.

It added: "Attendance needs to be managed because, while absent, young people are not benefiting from education to the value of ?1.6bn each year.

"This represents an educational loss to the young people themselves - absence from school can make a big difference to pupils' achievements.

"Pupils with high absence rates are much more likely to leave school with few or no qualifications and they are more at risk of being drawn into undesirable activities, including crime and anti-social behaviour."

Non-attendance varies widely between schools, from under 1% to almost 30% of school days, said the report. Schools in deprived areas, where large numbers of children receive free dinners, tend to have worse records.

But many schools' records are significantly better or worse than would be expected from their socio-economic make-up, suggesting that "at least some of the difference is likely to be due to how schools deal with absence".

The auditor general, Sir John Bourn, said: "Better attendance at school by pupils improves their educational achievements and, in turn, their lives and prospects.

"Even a small reduction in absence would result in many pupils receiving greater benefit from their education.

"The rate of absence from schools in England has proved difficult to reduce. However, the efforts of the DfES, local authorities and schools are starting to have an impact.

"They must keep up the momentum and reinforce in schools and among parents and pupils the importance of attending school."

The DfES has a target of reducing the total absence rate to 6.28% by 2008, representing some 39,000 more children in classes each day.

The schools minister, Stephen Twigg, said school attendance was at record levels, with 40,000 more pupils in school every day than in 1997.

"However, a hardcore of 2% of the country's 6.7 million pupils account for almost half of all truancy," he said.

"I welcome the NAO's recognition that our efforts are starting to have an impact, and in the months since these figures were recorded, schools and LEAs are now seizing the tools we have given them to crackdown on this minority.

"Schools are using the behaviour improvement programme to drive down truancy at twice the national rate. Fifty per cent of parents facing fast track prosecution improve their child's attendance before even reaching the courts.

"And one LEA which warned 800 parents that they would receive a penalty notice saw children's attendance improve in 776 cases."