GCSE results ‘hide’ lockdown truancy crisis

Figures for first year when grading has been restored to pre-pandemic levels will not include students who failed to sit exams altogether

GCSE results will hide the full scale of the lockdown truancy crisis, experts have suggested.
About 800,000 pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are set to open their GCSE results on Thursday, in the first year when grading will be restored to pre-pandemic levels in all three nations.
But experts warned that they could mask the effect of persistent absence levels on pupil attainment, since the figures will not include students who failed to show up to exams altogether.
Analysis by The Telegraph shows this year’s GCSE cohort were almost twice as likely to be persistently absent in the run-up to their exams than pupils taking them in the year before the pandemic.
The share of Year 11 pupils who missed more than 10 per cent of school was 27.3 per cent in the spring term of this year.
While this is down from 31.9 per cent in 2021/22, it is almost two-thirds higher than the 16.6 per cent in the same period in 2018/19.
Senior education sources told The Telegraph that trying to understand the full impact of persistent absence on GCSE results would be “messy”.
They said pupils may be withdrawn from an exam entirely if they failed to show up.
Ofqual also confirmed to The Telegraph that pupils who fail to show up for all exams for a particular subject are marked as “absent” rather than receiving a U grade.
In England, GCSEs are graded using a numerical system from 9 to 1, with 9 being the highest and 1 being the lowest.
Students can still receive a U grade if they failed to produce a gradable paper, but many persistently absent pupils are expected to have been removed from their exams altogether.
Beth Prescott, the school absence lead at the Centre for Social Justice, accused the Government of failing to address the high level of persistent absence with the urgency it requires.
“We’re just not seeing a response from the Government that matches the scale of the crisis at hand,” she told The Telegraph.
“This should have been one of the first things in the Government’s in-tray. They did speak a lot about absence in the run-up to the election, but we’ve not really seen that translate into any action.
“The summer period would have been a brilliant opportunity for this new Labour Government to prove that they’re going to get to grips on this issue, to really set out their score, but we’ve not particularly heard anything from them, and not seen anything to suggest that.”
Catherine McKinnell, the schools minister, said in February that “it will be Labour’s mission to break down the barriers to opportunity for every child”, adding: “Persistent absence will be the first barrier we seek to break.”
It comes as the latest available Department for Education (DfE) data show that 20.7 per cent of pupils aged five to 15 were persistently absent across the past academic year, slightly down from 21.2 per cent the year before.
It is almost double the 10.9 per cent pupils who were persistently absent in 2018/10, in the year before the pandemic.
The Government has said its measures to tackle persistent absence will include rolling out free breakfast clubs to primary school children and using artificial intelligence to spot school absence trends.
The party has also pledged to introduce a register of children not in school, though this will apply to pupils who are home-schooled or out of education entirely, rather than those who skip it occasionally.
Rebecca Montacute, the head of research and policy at the Sutton Trust, said they were “positive steps”, but that a new national strategy to tackle persistent absence was needed.
“I am really concerned that it’s going to be many, many years worth of school children who are impacted by this and losing all of that progress on the attainment gap,” she told The Telegraph. “I think we need to be ready for, at the moment, a very long tail from this crisis.”
Ms Montacute called on the Government to restore the National Tutoring Programme, a scheme designed to help disadvantaged pupils catch-up from the pandemic which was scrapped in February and fund tailored support for children frequently missing school.
“[They should be] doing things like reversing the real terms erosion of pupil premium funding given to schools specifically for disadvantaged pupils, which has been eroded in real terms over time,” she said.
“It also means reinstating the National Tutoring Programme, which Labour haven’t said anything on so far.”
Experts also warned that persistently absent pupils who did sit some of their GCSE exams this summer would likely see poor results on Thursday.
Allen Joseph, a researcher at the Education Policy Institute, told The Telegraph: “We know that absence rates have increased….we speculate that perhaps poor mental health is playing a role. It’s likely that these things are all intertwined in some way and are potentially contributing negatively to pupils’ GCSE outcomes.”
Prof Alan Smithers, the director of education at the University of Buckingham who forecasts exams each year, said this year’s GCSE results should see a drop of up to 71,000 top grades if officials made good on their promise to restore GCSE results to their 2019 levels when 20.8 per cent of entries were awarded a grade 7 or above.
However, he claimed the promised drop in top grades might not happen in reality since “the [DfE] is currently giving the impression of wanting ‘feel-good’ results”.
It comes as headteachers also claimed more students have been applying to sit their exams in smaller rooms away from the main exam hall since the pandemic.
Pepe Di’Iasio, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The levels of anxiety exhibited by students in the run-in to these exams – in what was the end of Year 11 for them – was heightened much more than we have ever seen before.
“This is post-pandemic. It’s certainly growing, it’s certainly a trend that I am seeing across lots of schools.”
A Department for Education spokesman said: “We have made it our mission to break down barriers to opportunity and give every child the best start in life. Strong foundations of learning are grounded in good attendance and we know absence rates are too high.
“The measures we are introducing will tackle the root causes of absence. We are providing access to specialist mental health professionals in every secondary school, introducing free breakfast clubs in every primary and ensuring earlier intervention in mainstream schools for pupils with special needs.”