Calculating Attendance/PA 

In practice this can be quite difficult to calculate unless you have a system such as Bromcom to do this for you.  Please remember that the default attendance rate only includes pupils of statutory school age.  Note also that it does include pupils who may no longer be on your school roll so cannot be calculated only by looking at the attendance of those pupils currently on roll.  For this reason you may find that you get different absence rates from different sources because the pupils on which the rate is based may be slightly different.

With the attendance rate, remember that a high number is good although sometimes you will see this inverted and quoted as an absence rate when a high number is bad!

Persistent Absence Rate - Official Definition

A pupil enrolment is identified as a persistent absentee (PA) if they miss 10% or more of their possible sessions. 

Persistent absence rate = (Number of enrolments classed as persistent absentees / Number of enrolments) x 100%

A little more caution has to be applied when calculating persistent absence rates.  This is because, for example, in the first week of the new academic year, any child who is absent for a single session will be a persistent absentee!  It is sometimes therefore more helpful to consider who may/will become a persistent absentee by the end of the academic year.  With the exception of children in reception (because of the SSA rules), children will generally become a persistent absentee if they miss 19 or more school days within the academic year.  Once a child hits this threshold there is no going back until the next academic year.

Many people also make the mistake of thinking that once a child is removed from their roll they will no longer count in the figures - this is not correct.  The information dept can provide you with an accurate PA figure and these are also made available centrally at each KPI point.  NOTE:  If a pupil has been enrolled and has subsequently left your school before they have ever reached statutory school age then they do not need to be included in the calculation.

With the COVID-19 pandemic needing to be taken into account, making sense of persistent absence has become even more complicated over the past few academic years because children who tested positive for COVID-19 were required to stay at home for 10 days.   Therefore be very wary about comparing persistent absence from year to year as they are not directly comparable.

The most important use of persistent absence is to identify any pupils who may have a chronic attendance issue and to work to support them to be in school fully.  Therefore the most important thing is to be able to demonstrate that all pupils with poor attendance have had an appropriate form of intervention to support their regular attendance going forward.

With the persistent absence rate remember that a high number is bad.

If you want to find out more about the methodology used to calculate absence statistics (nationally) then take a look at the DfE guidance document which can be accessed below.

Severely Absent

This is a relatively new term adopted by the DfE to describe pupils who have been absent for 50% or more of the academic year.  For a small period this was previously known as hyper-PA pupils.  There will be an increasing focus during the year on any pupils who are, or may become severely absent and it is important to ensure that appropriate action is taken (and documented) to support each and every pupil and family in this situation.  Severely absent pupils will be monitored centrally from time to time.