Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has said that headteachers “have a duty” to drive to the homes of absent pupils and bring them to school.
School chiefs have expressed concern in recent weeks after data showed that overall attendance rates in state schools fell to 86.9 per cent on July 7.
Analysis of state school rolls by the FFT Datalab research consultancy estimates that year 11 students, aged 15-16 and studying for their GCSE exams, missed 4.5 per cent of all sessions for unauthorised reasons up to mid-May, compared with 2.1 per cent in 2018-19.
Asked how to boost attendance, Ms Keegan she would “pick them (students) up myself” in a wide-ranging interview with Sky News.
She told the broadcaster: “They [headteachers] do have a duty. We all have to play our part. Sometimes you have to go [to the home] or sometimes you have to text the parent in the morning. Sometimes you just have to do whatever is possible.
“That’s not what we want headteachers doing all of their days. But to be honest, right now, if that works to get somebody in school, it’s worth it.
“I’d go pick them up myself if I could.”
Asked if the government should make a register of missing pupils mandatory, Ms Keegan said: “It’s something that my fellow MPs are very concerned about. I don’t have the exact date because there is a parliamentary process we have to go through, but we do intend to put it on a statutory footing and we will do that as soon as the parliamentary time allows.”
Ms Keegan also confirmed the 6.5 per cent pay rise offered to teachers will be honoured in the “long term” by the Government.
Asked by Times Radio whether she would be willing to make such a commitment, she replied: “This Government will.
“I don’t know about what others will do, but this Government definitely would and this is a normal pattern.
“You have spending reviews for a period of time and then you look at that going forward for a year, two, three years, depending on the situation at the time, and that is a normal part of government.”
About 1.7 million children are regularly absent from school while more than 125,000 are “ghost children” who are missing most of their schooling, according to official figures.
A rise in mental health problems and a culture of staying at home during lockdowns are thought to be among reasons that the number of children absent more than 50 per cent of the time has doubled since the start of the pandemic.
Severely absent children are most likely to become both perpetrators and victims of crime. The figures are highest in deprived areas. In Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Bradford more than one pupil per secondary school class is missing most of the time.
