The government is to make a new effort to repair sagging school attendance figures in England, with the education secretary to announce funding for “attendance mentors” in some of the worst-affected areas.
Pupil absences remain stubbornly higher than before the Covid pandemic, and during a visit to Liverpool on Monday Gillian Keegan is expected to announce plans for caseworkers to offer one-to-one support for pupils in 10 areas including Blackpool and Walsall, where rates of unauthorised absences remain far above national levels.
But critics said the government was failing to tackle the magnitude of the problem after an estimated 1.5 million pupils missed 10% or more of their scheduled classes in autumn and spring last year.
A pilot involving attendance mentors is already being run in five areas by the children’s charity Barnardo’s, including in Middlesbrough, Stoke-on-Trent and Knowsley, with Keegan’s announcement expanding the programme to groups of schools in 15 “priority education investment areas”.
A £15m tender by the Department for Education (DfE) last year estimated that the recruited mentors would work with 3,600 children for one year initially, in addition to the 1,600 children to be mentored in the pilots run by Barnardo’s over three years.
A Labour source said: “This is a laughably poor response to the biggest challenge facing schools today. One in five kids are regularly missing school – Gillian Keegan’s answer is akin to putting out a raging inferno with a water pistol.
“It’s another crushing reminder that the conveyor belt of useless Tory education secretaries have nothing to offer when it comes to improving children’s life chances.
“Only Bridget Phillipson [the shadow education secretary] and Labour have a long-term plan to tackle absence – that starts with mental health counsellors in every secondary school, mental health hubs for young people in every community and breakfast clubs for every primary school pupil to boost attendance.”
Phillipson is expected to announce her own plans to improve attendance next week.
Jessica Prestidge, the deputy policy director for the Centre for Social Justice thinktank, said: “We have been saying that the government should make the attendance mentor programme a national one as soon as possible, because the problem is of a different scale to the solution the government is putting forward.
“We’re talking here about 140,000 children who are missing [from school] at least 50% of the time, according to the latest data, and the government’s programme is only going to reach a tiny fraction of them. This is a real problem with lasting consequences and we don’t think the government is doing enough about it.”
A spokesperson for Barnardo’s said its mentors were able to do valuable work by making connections with individual children and overcoming barriers that were stopping them from attending school regularly.
In one case, a mentor found a girl was not attending school because she had to share her only pair of shoes with her mother – meaning she could not go to school if her mother needed to wear shoes that day.
Lynn Perry, Barnardo’s chief executive, said: “Our attendance mentoring pilot scheme shows that one of the best ways to improve attendance is working individually with children, building trust and listening to their concerns.
“Our mentors encourage children to talk openly about issues such as family finances, bullying, or mental health worries – anything they feel may be preventing them from going to school.
“In Middlesbrough, 82% of the children we have worked with improved their attendance through one-on-one support from an attendance mentor, with almost two-thirds of the children saying their mental health also improved.”
Keegan said last year “there is still more work to be done” to improve attendance but the most recent figures published by the DfE showed unauthorised absences in secondary schools, as well as absences involving illness, were still far higher than before the pandemic.
