Recent
Most read
Get the best experience in our app
Enjoy offline reading, category favourites, and instant updates - right from your pocket.
Small number of pupils fuels soaring unauthorised absence rates
The trend is most pronounced at secondary, where almost half of unauthorised absence is down to students who were missing from school without permission 15 times or more in a year
A small minority of pupils across both primary and secondary is responsible for a huge chunk of unauthorised absence in England’s schools, finds analysis by .
Students with at least 15 separate spells of absence over the course of 2024-25 accounted for 48 per cent of unauthorised absence recorded in secondary schools, and 22 per cent of pupils in primaries.
In contrast, 8 per cent of unauthorised absence at secondary came from students with a single spell of absence in 2024-25, compared with 23 per cent at primary.
Analysing data submitted by over 10,000 schools, FFT finds that unauthorised absences were recorded for 1,519 different pupils in primary schools and 2,338 different students in secondaries.
Of those, only 34 primary pupils (2 per cent) and 167 secondary students (7 per cent) recorded 15 or more separate spells of absence.
However, they made “outsized contributions to the overall unauthorised absence rate”: these small groups of pupils added 0.4 percentage points to the unauthorised absence rate at primary schools and 1.7 percentage points at secondary level.
Rise in post-Covid unauthorised absence
A growing problem with unauthorised absence has been highlighted in the years following the pandemic.
The FFT sets its new analysis in context by noting that unauthorised absence accounts overall for around 30-40 per cent of all missed sessions; at primary, unauthorised absence rates are around 50 per cent higher than before Covid, while at secondary they have almost doubled.
FFT also finds that pupils with many spells of unauthorised absence are “much more likely” to come from disadvantaged backgrounds or have an education, health and care plan.
In secondaries, 64 per cent of students with 15 or more unauthorised absence spells are disadvantaged (as measured by eligibility for free school meals in the previous six years), and the figure is even higher in primary (77 per cent).
In November 2025, FFT found that rates of absence remained “stubbornly high” and warned that they showed little sign of coming down.
You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Vlog magazine on and on