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Jan 15, 2025 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon
When we last looked at absence back in November, we found that there had been little change from the previous year at primary, and a slight reduction at secondary. In this post, we’ll see whether these patterns held for the rest of the term. With a full term of data under our belts, we’ll also take a more detailed look at persistent absence. As usual, data for this post comes from our FFT Attendance Tracker schools – around 6,000 primary and 2,500 secondary schools across England.
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Nov 3, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon
Since our last absence roundup, at the end of Spring Term last year, we’ve had a change of Government. The new education secretary has made clear her commitment to tackling high rates of absence in schools, enacting the previous Government’s plan to increase absence fines, and expanding the use of attendance support mentors. Now that we’re half-way through Autumn Term, let’s see if there’s any early good news.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon |Pupil demographics
Recently, we were commissioned by CASE (campaign for state education) to investigate the rate at which pupils moved on and off school rolls. In particular, they were interested to see whether there were differences between local authority (LA) schools and academies. You can read our full report here. Or, for a summary of the highlights, read on…We used data from the National Pupil Database (NPD) on around 2.5 million pupils.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon
Measuring pupil mobility in secondary schools in England Katie Beynon is a statistician at FFT Education Datalab, having previously spent five years as a secondary school data manager and three in higher education. Her main research interests are inclusion and fairness in education, with a particular focus on the areas of attendance, curriculum, and student outcomes....
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon
National headlines for this year’s Key Stage 2 tests were released by DfE last month. They showed that, overall, attainment was up slightly on last year, but remained below pre-pandemic levels. (61% of pupils met the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, compared with 60% last year and 65% in 2019.)In today’s post, we’re going to dig behind the headlines. In particular, we’ll be looking at how disadvantaged pupils fared this year.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon |Pupil demographics
A couple of months ago we looked at how absence changed as pupils passed from one year group into the next. However, due to data constraints at the time, we weren’t able to include the transition between Year 6 and Year 7. Since then, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes. And today we’re going to deliver on our (weakly worded) promise to “revisit [the topic] in a future post”. Here, we’re going to focus on how changes in attendance from Year 6 into Year 7 vary by disadvantage.
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May 21, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon |Dave Thomson
Prior to the pandemic we had begun work on a School Quality Index which attempted to measure the quality of schools in terms of both inclusion and academic outcomes. We plan to publish an update to that work later in the year. Ahead of that, in this article we set out our approach to measuring academic outcomes using a contextualised Progress 8 measure. Alongside it we have produced an appendix (xlsx) of school-level scores for 2023.
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May 16, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon
The past few weeks have seen a renewed push on attendance from the DfE. One thing that caught our eye was this tweet from Baroness Barran, in which she talks about the importance of schools focussing on pupils who miss between 5% and 15% of sessions. She explains in a follow-up tweet that schools might be better able to improve the attendance of these pupils, rather than focussing only on severely absent pupils (those who miss 50%+ of sessions) where a multi-agency response is often needed.
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Apr 22, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon
Progress 8 was introduced as an accountability measure for all schools in England in 2016. It aimed to improve on the previous measure (the percentage of pupils achieving five GCSEs at A*-C including English and maths) by taking prior attainment into account. And incentivising schools to focus their efforts on all pupils, rather than those at the C/D borderline[1]. But what we’re interested in here is what’s happened since then.
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Apr 16, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon
When we last looked at pupil absence, at the end of Autumn Term, we saw a small improvement compared with the previous Autumn. And we showed that this was mostly due to a reduction in absence recorded as illness, particularly at primary. Though rates of absence and persistent absence remained some way above pre-pandemic norms. In this post, we’ll see what happened in Spring Term.
