Persistent Absence Isn’t a Discipline Problem: What the 2025/26 Attendance Figures Really Tell Us

The Department for Education has just published its end-of-year attendance figures for 2025/26. If you’re a parent whose child can’t get through the school gates, you don’t need a government spreadsheet to tell you what this year looked like. You lived it – the mornings that ended in tears, the phone calls, the letters about attendance percentages that treated your child’s distress as a compliance issue. But the numbers matter, because they tell us something the letters never admit: this is not a problem with your child. It is a problem the system is failing to solve at national scale.

Across state-funded secondary schools in England, the absence rate for 2025/26 was 8.57% (DfE, Pupil attendance in schools, week 29 2026 release, 6 Aug 2026). More striking is the persistent absence figure: 24.21% of secondary-age young people missed at least 10% of their sessions. That is nearly one in four. Not a fringe of “truants”. A quarter of the secondary cohort.

The gap tells its own story about who this is happening to. Absence rates for young people eligible for free school meals were 10.87%, more than double the 5.26% for those not eligible. Persistent absence ranges from around 23% in London to 27% in the North East. Before the pandemic, the national figure sat at roughly 14% [FFT Education Datalab, comparing 2018/19].

Here is the finding that should be making headlines. According to FFT Education Datalab’s analysis, 2025/26 is the first post-pandemic year with no meaningful reduction in absence. Every year since 2021, the numbers crept slowly back towards pre-pandemic levels, and ministers pointed to the trend as proof the approach was working. This year the trend flatlined. Unauthorised absence at secondary remains, in FFT’s words, stubbornly high.

Think about what the system has thrown at this problem in that time: fines, prosecution, attendance hubs, mentors, dashboards that track every child’s percentage in real time, letters home at 93%. The full weight of the standard playbook. And the result, after all of it, is a plateau with a quarter of secondary-age young people still persistently absent.

The numbers stopped moving because the approach doesn’t work.

The language of the attendance system — “unauthorised”, “persistent”, “severe” — is the language of defiance. It assumes a child who won’t. Families in our community know a different child: one who can’t.

We hear the same story many times over in our 36,000-strong community. A girl who masked her way through primary school, praised for being no trouble, quietly running on empty. Secondary school arrives with its noise, its corridors, its constant social demand, and the cost of holding it together climbs until she collapses. Then come the mornings when her body simply will not walk through the door. What the dashboard records as unauthorised absence is, up close, an autistic young person in burnout — and very often one nobody has yet identified as autistic at all, because she doesn’t look like the boys the checklists were built around.

A fine does not touch any of that. A reward chart does not touch any of that. You cannot sanction a child out of a state their nervous system is in. Treating distress as defiance doesn’t just fail to help; it teaches the child that the adults in charge do not see her, and it pushes families who are already at breaking point into an adversarial fight with the very school that is meant to be on their side.

None of this is mysterious, and none of it is beyond a school’s reach. It starts with a different first question. Not “how do we get her in?” but “why is being in unbearable?” When schools genuinely investigate that question – sensory environment, unstructured time, masking, unidentified need – attendance tends to look after itself, because children go where they feel safe.

It means recognising autistic girls and gender-diverse young people before crisis point, not two years into an EHCP fight. It means listening to parents as the experts they are rather than quoting attendance policy at them. And it means training staff to understand what internalised autistic presentation actually looks like, from people who know it from the inside. That training exists: our neurodivergent-led training for schools and services does exactly this, and the professionals who take it consistently tell us it changes how they see the children in front of them.

If your child is one of the numbers in this week’s release, hold on to this: one in four means you are not an anomaly, you are not a bad parent, and your child is not broken. The scale of these figures is painful, but it is also proof that this is systemic. Systems can be challenged, and children who have been out of school for months or even years can re-engage when the pressure comes off and the understanding goes in. We watch it happen every week – including through The Haven, our specialist online school, where young people who hadn’t left their bedrooms in months are learning again.

Start where thousands of families have started: join our Facebook community, come to a free monthly family workshop, announced on our social media channels, or point your child’s school towards our training. You don’t have to fight this on your own.