9. What measures are in place to improve school attendance, especially amongst pupils who receive free school meals? OAQ(5)0025(EDU)

Thank you, David. The all-Wales attendance framework has a direct impact on levels of attendance. Along with wider education programmes, including ‘Rewriting the future’ and the pupil deprivation grant, positive progress is being made in better engaging all young people in education.

Minister, whilst the situation is gradually improving, absenteeism is still a concern in nearly a third of our secondary schools. Those who are eligible for free school meals are twice as likely to be absent as those who are not on free school meals, and just under a fifth of those on free school meals are persistently absent, with dire effects on their educational attainment. Yet less than half of schools have carried out a good enough analysis of why pupils do not attend school—that’s according to Estyn. Would you, however, commend best practice in the sector, such as Cathays High School, which has 37 per cent of their children eligible for free school meals, yet is making good progress in increasing attendance rates?

Thank you, David. I would like to say that absence from secondary schools has dropped faster for free-school-meal pupils than for any other pupils over the last five years. Since 2009-10, it has dropped 3.6 percentage points, whereas for others it dropped by 2.6, so we’re making better progress for children on free school meals than we are with the rest of the cohort. But there is still more to do, because we know that regular attendance at school is the best chance that children have to gain the positive experience and the qualifications that they need. I would expect schools to have carried out work to understand the reasons why some children are persistently missing from school, but I would indeed want to commend not only the good practice that you have highlighted in schools that you are familiar with, but also of other schools I’ve visited.

This summer, I visited Cefn Hengoed Community School in Swansea. They’ve focused on improving attendance through employing an attendance officer, with a particular focus on free-school-meal learners. Since 2012, the school reports that the average attendance of free-school-meal learners has risen by 6.9 per cent, so there is good practice out there. I would expect individual schools to take this issue seriously, and I would expect regional consortia to be working in schools across their region to ensure that, where good practice is happening and good results are being delivered by schools on this agenda, that good practice is employed in other schools where progress is not as good as you or I would want it to be.