The increase inYear 11s skipping school since the COVID-19 pandemic.

John Jerrim, Professor at UCL Institute of Education and part-time Research Director at ImpactEd Group, shares insights on his latest work for the University and how it links with IEG’s Understanding Attendance project.

It has been widely reported that– since the pandemic – school absences in England have risen. This is obviously a major challenge facing our education system; young people are unlikely to learn much unless we can get them through the school gates.

Truancy – aka playing hooky - are an important subset of school absences. They represent occasions where young people have not turned up to school without good reason. This is clearly something that all schools want to stamp out.

In a new academic working paper published today with UCL IOE, I investigate how often Year 11s in England report skipping school. I then compare this to the situation in other countries, and how this has changed before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of our headline results is presented in Figure 1 below. This presents, for each country, the percentage of 15-year-olds that reported skipping school at least once over the last two-weeks prior to the pandemic (2012-2018) and after the pandemic (2022). English-speaking countries are highlighted in green circles.

Interestingly, in most developed countries, there has not been a rise in truancy since the COVID-19 pandemic; in some, there have even been declines.

The nine English-speaking countries (including all four nations that form the UK) are exceptions to this rule. In these countries, the percentage of 15-year-olds skipping school has increased dramatically.

For instance, prior to the pandemic, 18% of Year 11s reported having skipped school at least once in the last fortnight. This has now increased to 26%. In Wales, the increase is even starker, moving from 25% to 37%.

There is one other notable area where English-speaking countries (including all members of the UK) stand out. That is in terms of gender differences, as reported in Table 1 below.

Across most developed countries, 15-year-old boys and girls report skipping school at a similar rate (around 20%).

But – in English-speaking nations– Year 11 girls are more likely to report skipping school than Year 11 boys. For instance, in England, 29% of girls said they had skipped school at some point over the last two weeks, compared to 23% of boys.

The figures for Wales are once again particularly stark. While a third of Year 11 boys said they had skipped school at least once over the last two weeks, the figure was over 40% for girls.

These gender disparities could marry with some of the findings of the first Understanding Attendance report from ImpactEd Group, which sought to explore the drivers of attendance at a school level. It is interesting to note that male pupils consistently scored higher on questions including “People in this school are friendly to me,” “I feel like a real part of my school,” and “I can really be myself in this school.”

The answers to these attendance challenges are complex, but the importance of belonging is something that has been underlined numerous times and is a message seemingly being picked up by the current Government. Happiness and wellbeing: Phillipson's CST speech in full

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