Schools to Get Individual Attendance Targets

The BBC understands schools will not be penalised for missing targets, but they will be monitored. Schools will also be encouraged to offer more clubs and activities on Fridays, to improve attendance at the end of the week. It comes as official attendance data, published on Thursday, suggested school absence rates in England remained above pre-pandemic levels, with nearly one in five pupils missing at least 10% of school in the 2025/26 academic year.

Education minister Paul Waugh said the new attendance targets would take each school's local challenges into account, but that "every school has a role to play to improve attendance". Before the Covid pandemic, when many schools closed to pupils for significant periods of time, attendance rates at English mainstream state schools regularly stayed above 95%, but schools have struggled to get back to those rates in the years since. Thursday's figures, external suggested an overall attendance rate of 93% for 2025/26, a slight decrease on the previous year.