Understanding school absence in England: to what extent does poverty stop children going to school, and how can Government policy help?
Attending school is crucial to children’s intellectual and social development. But, since the pandemic, absence rates have rocketed, with more than one fifth of children classed as persistently absent in 2022/23 (missing 10% of school days or more). This research will use administrative data on more than 20 million children in England to contribute to our understanding of the school absence crisis in several ways. In Chapter 1, I will use recent advances in descriptive methods to understand patterns in absence rates over time and differences in absence rates by student characteristics. Chapter 2 will focus on the role of family income, as it has been suggested that lack of uniform, food and transport, as well as increased parental stress associated with poverty, prevents children from attending school. The two-child benefit limit (introduced in 2017) leads to families on benefits with more than two children being more than £3000 a year worse off. Using empirical policy evaluation techniques, I will test if this and other benefit reductions leads to higher absence rates among children in affected families. Finally in Chapter 3, I will focus on whether government intervention can improve absence rates in a cost-effective way by evaluating the impact of policies that are being rolled out to support schools and individual families to improve attendance. Inevitably, given the ongoing nature of their roll-out, these policies have received minimal evaluation to date. Rigorous quasi-experimental methods could help identify any positive cost-benefit ratios and pave the way for future policy development.