Stalled progress in reducing school absence highlights need for understanding neurodivergent pupils

New Department for Education data reveals that school absence rates remain stubbornly high, exposing persistent inequalities and signalling that enforcement alone is insufficient. Experts call for greater understanding of neurodivergent pupils’ needs to tackle the underlying issues.

The latest Department for Education attendance data should be a warning that England’s school-absence problem has not been solved, only managed. In state-funded secondary schools, the absence rate for the 2025/26 academic year stood at 8.57%, while 24.21% of pupils were classed as persistently absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of possible sessions. The gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers remains stark: absence among children eligible for free school meals was 10.87%, compared with 5.26% for those who were not. Persistent absence also varied by region, running at about 23% in London and 27% in the North East, according to Department for Education figures analysed by FFT Education Datalab.

That matters because, as FFT Education Datalab has pointed out, 2025/26 is the first post-pandemic year in which absence did not continue its gradual recovery. In other words, the long, slow improvement seen since 2021 has stalled. Tes reported that unauthorised absence remains stubbornly high despite years of intervention from ministers, including fines, prosecutions, attendance hubs, mentors and near-real-time tracking systems. The latest figures suggest that the standard policy toolkit has reached its limit.

A closer look at the data also shows that absenteeism is not spread evenly. Tes reported that a relatively small group of pupils accounts for a disproportionate share of unauthorised absence, with students who have at least 15 separate spells of absence responsible for 48% of unauthorised absence in secondary schools. Another Tes report said severe absence, defined as missing at least half of possible sessions, has reached a record level, underlining how entrenched the most serious cases have become.

For autistic girls and other neurodivergent pupils, that pattern is often misunderstood. What schools label as refusal or non-compliance can instead be burnout, masking fatigue or an environment that has become overwhelming. The article argues that many families are dealing with children who cannot manage school attendance in the way the system expects, especially where needs have not been identified early. It says the problem is not simply one of discipline, but of distress, and that punishment rarely changes a child’s underlying capacity to cope.

The practical answer, the piece suggests, is not more pressure but better understanding. That means asking why school has become unbearable, rather than how to force attendance, and looking at sensory overload, unstructured time and unmet need. It also means identifying autistic girls and gender-diverse pupils before crisis point and treating parents as informed partners rather than as obstacles to be corrected. The broader lesson from the new figures is that attendance will not improve through enforcement alone if schools continue to miss the reasons children stop coming.