What "persistent absence" really means

Attendance data can look reassuring at a glance and still be hiding something worth knowing about. A school might report a perfectly ordinary overall absence rate, while a meaningful chunk of its pupils are missing school far more often than that average suggests. That's exactly what "persistent absence" is designed to surface.

Two different numbers, two different questions

Schools report attendance in a couple of distinct ways, and it's easy to conflate them:

• Overall absence rate answers out of all the school days that could have happened this year, across every pupil, what percentage were missed? It's an average spread across the whole school.
• Persistent absence rate answers a different question entirely: what percentage of pupils individually missed 10% or more of their possible school sessions? Roughly speaking, that's about one day in every ten.

A school can have a modest, unremarkable overall absence rate while still having a notable persistent absence rate — because a relatively small number of pupils missing school often can pull the individual count up, without moving the school-wide average very much at all. This is exactly why looking at persistent absence separately matters: it can reveal something the average genuinely doesn't.

Why it's worth paying attention to

Regular attendance is strongly linked to how well pupils do academically and how settled they feel day to day. A school with a high persistent absence rate isn't necessarily doing anything wrong — the reasons behind chronic absence are often personal and complicated: ongoing illness, anxiety, family circumstances, or difficulties that have nothing to do with the school itself. But it's still a useful signal worth understanding, particularly if it's noticeably higher than similar schools nearby, since it may point to something about the school's environment, support systems, or how effectively it's engaging with pupils and families who are struggling to attend.

How to read it sensibly

• Look at both numbers together, not just one. A high persistent absence rate alongside an otherwise normal overall rate tells a genuinely different story than both being elevated together.
• Check the trend across years, not just the latest figure — a one-year spike can reflect a specific local issue (an illness outbreak, for instance) rather than an ongoing pattern.
• Compare against similar schools, not an abstract ideal — some level of persistent absence exists everywhere, and national context matters more than a number in isolation.

Attendance data is best read as one piece of a bigger picture, alongside Ofsted's own judgements and academic results — not as a standalone verdict on a school.