Every mainstream state school in England will be given their own target to improve pupil attendance, the government has confirmed. Schools will also be encouraged to offer more clubs and activities on Fridays, to improve attendance at the end of the week. It comes as official attendance data, published on Thursday, suggested school absence rates in England remained above pre-pandemic levels, with nearly one in five pupils missing at least 10% of school in the 2025/26 academic year.
Education minister Paul Waugh said the new attendance targets would take each school's local challenges into account, but that "every school has a role to play to improve attendance". Before the Covid pandemic, when many schools closed to pupils for significant periods of time, attendance rates at English mainstream state schools regularly stayed above 95%, but schools have struggled to get back to those rates in the years since. Thursday's figures, external suggested an overall attendance rate of 93% for 2025/26, a slight decrease on the previous year.
That includes both authorised absences, such as illness, and unauthorised absences, which is when pupils miss school without permission or a valid reason. The rates of persistent absence have doubled since the pandemic. A pupil is described as persistently absent if they miss at least 10% of school sessions.
In 2018/19, persistent absence rates for England state schools were around 10%, while the most recent data showed it was at 19% in 2025/26. Pupils on free school meals and those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) were also still more likely to be absent from school than their peers. How to help your child have good attendance Many mainstream schools in England were given attendance targets specific to their school in a widespread trial last year, but on Thursday the Department for Education (DfE) confirmed that every school would be getting their own target and that it would be monitored for the first time.
The BBC understands there will be no immediate penalties for schools who miss their attendance targets, but that the DfE will get in touch with schools that are off-track to make sure they are aware and taking action. Schools could then be pointed towards best practice guidance, or encouraged to join with other schools in a local behaviour and attendance hub. The regulator Ofsted already considers a schools' overall attendance rates in their inspections.
In an opinion piece published in The Independent newspaper on Thursday, newly-appointed education minister Paul Waugh said the latest attendance stats showed "progress has slowed over the past year", and that the government's response needed to be "broader, smarter and more ambitious". Schools have been promised access to more data tools in the coming year to help them analyse individual pupils' attendance records, Waugh said, so they can identify concerns earlier and be "intervening more quickly when pupils begin to drift away from regular attendance". Fridays are "becoming a particular weak spot for attendance", he added, and said he would be investigating why pupil illness absences are regularly significantly higher at the end of each week.
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