Attendance and Deprivation

The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) combines information from the seven domains to produce an overall relative measure of deprivation. The domains are combined using the following weights: 

 Income Deprivation (22.5%) 

 Employment Deprivation (22.5%) 

 Education, Skills and Training Deprivation (13.5%) 

 Health Deprivation and Disability (13.5%) 

 Crime (9.3%) 

 Barriers to Housing and Services (9.3%) 

 Living Environment Deprivation (9.3%) 

The weights were derived from consideration of the academic literature on poverty and deprivation, as well as the levels of robustness of the indicators. 

You can find out everything that you need to know about the IMD 2019 by clicking on this link.

IDACI

Although IMD is important to understand for education, the commonly used index of deprivation within education is the IDACI index, which is a subset of IMD.  The Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI)  is a ranking based on the percentage of children aged 0 - 15 in each lower super output area (LSOA) living in families that are income deprived - i.e. in receipt of income support, income based jobseeker's allowance or pension credit, or those not in receipt of these benefits but in receipt of Child Tax Credit with an equivalised income (excluding housing benefits) below 60% of the national median before housing costs.  Not surprisingly, as it is sourced from the same dataset but slightly different to IMD, its rankings with IMD tend to be broadly similar.  (Just for the sake of completeness, there is also another subset of IMD which is the Income Deprivation Affecting Older People Index.)  A new set of IDACI data was published in September 2019 and is now being used by Ofsted.  You are therefore advised to check your current ISDR against your previous ones to see if your allocated IDACI quintile (and thus the national data that you can use for comparison) has changed.

Deprivation and Attendance

There are three measures of deprivation that link to attendance and have their own national attendance figures for comparison.  Of course all three should be similar for any given school but you should be aware of the differences and use these to maximum advantage when presenting attendance data.

1)  'Ever6' - this is defined as the percentage of pupils currently in receipt of free school meals or who have been eligible for free school meals in the last six years.  It differs from pupil premium slightly in that it does not include children looked after or service children (although either of these categories may qualify as 'ever6' separately).  (Just to confuse you 'deprived' children are those who are either 'ever6' or 'looked after' but does not include service children.)  In primary schools the national average attendance rate 2017/18 (ie pre-COVID) for 'ever6' children was 93.3%, in secondary schools it was 91.9% and in special schools it was 88.4%.

2)  IDACI decile by location of school - this can be found using a lookup table but note that there may be a difference between the deprivation rate of the LSOA that the school is located in and the deprivation levels of the children who attend that school.  The advantage of using this measure of deprivation is that national average attendance rates are published by IDACI decile which makes them more sensitive to deprivation than the Ofsted IDACI quintiles (see below).  The results generated in an Excel file from using the lookup table will give you full IMD and IDACI information for your academy including the IDACI decile (where 1 is the 10% most deprived and 10 is the 10% least deprived) and the information needed to make a more exact calculation of your relative deprivation (calculated by finding the IDACI rank and dividing it by 32,844 - the smaller the percentage the greater the deprivation).

The IDACI decile for your academy can then be compared against the national average attendance rates for your IDACI decile as per the table below.

3)  IDACI quintile as decided by Ofsted - this can be found by downloading the latest Ofsted gradings Excel file and looking up the IDACI quintile allocated by Ofsted.  Just to be a little confusing, the number convention used by Ofsted is the opposite of that used for deciles with quintile 5 being the most deprived 20% and quintile 1 being the least deprived 20%.  This data is calculated a little differently to the IDACI deciles mentioned above as it is based on the actual home location of the pupils rather than the location of the school.  However, because the measure is quintiles, it is not as sophisticated as deciles and this could disadvantage some schools if they are at an extreme end of a quintile (eg a school in  top 1% of deprivation is going to be compared with schools in top 20% by this measure).  Note that in the latest primary IDSRs, Ofsted quote both the IDACI quintile of the school by postcode and by pupil base (find this on page 4 of IDSR under heading of Local Area Guidance).  Where these differ, make sure that you have a plausible explanation for the difference in the event of an inspection.  Remember also that quintile 5 will have more variation in it than quintiles 1-4 combined.  Therefore if you are in quintile 5 you should know where within quintile 5 your academy is.  Take a look at this very useful article if you need more information on this.

Here is the national primary attendance deprivation data 2018/19 (ie pre-COVID) for comparison (data for the previous year is also available if you scroll down the document):