Schooling

As explained in my June post, my focus in the coming months will be on updating sections of the chapter in my last book on the condition of young people.[1] This one aims to evidence and analyse how they are (and indeed often are not) engaging with ‘schooling’ – the formal educational provision which, by law, they are required to attend to the age of 16.

A Government paper published in June 2024 provided some positive evidence on this.[2] It for example showed that, since 2023, 0.6 per cent more 16-18 year olds and 0.9 per cent more 18 year olds had been participating in education, training and employment. Two months later findings released by the Joint Council for Qualifications pointed, too, to a post-Covid ‘bounce back’ in pupils’ GCSE grades.[3]

However, in this period, in this key area of provision, positive news of this kind was, to say the least, rare.

Attendance

Especially striking was the evidence on the numbers who weren’t actually making it to school in the morning and who, even when they were, were failing to engage in any meaningful or motivated way. According to statistics from the Department of Education (DoE), in 2022-23 150,000 children nominally enrolled in state schools in England were classed as ‘severely absent’ – that is, as not coming into school for 10 per cent or more of their lessons. This was 30,000 more than in the previous year and 150,000 more than four years earlier. As such absences continued well above the pre-Covid levels, by March 2024 one pupil in 50 was thus judged to be missing at least half their lessons.[4]

Though, compared with 2021-22, these ‘persistently absent’ numbers had improved slightly by March 2024, they remained much higher than the pre-2020 levels.[5] Updated evidence, for example, from a study by Children’s Commissioner for England released in September 2024 found that at some point between Spring 2022 and Spring 2023 the total missing-from-education figure was still at over 11,500.[6] Moreover, according to research carried out by the Carers Trust, these absentees were twice as likely as their peers to be getting free school meals and each year on average 39 per cent of young carers were missing 23 days of schooling.[7]

Providing some insight into the possible causes of such ‘school avoidance’ was emerging evidence on how safe pupils felt in the school environment. Findings by the University College London (UCL), published in 2025, showed for example that in England between 2019 and 2023 positive boys’ responses to this question declined from 41 per cent to 31 per cent and girls’ from 42 per cent to 21 per cent, with the latter reporting that they felt ‘more disenchanted with their education’. Probably not unconnected, since 2020 the ‘persistent absence’ statistic for state secondary schools girls had reached 26.8 per cent compared with 24.3 per cent of boys.[8]

According to the study by the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Commission referenced earlier, these absences were being prompted by a ‘complex interplay of factors’ – summarised as ‘… poor mental health, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), poverty, bullying, racism, discrimination, and caring responsibilities’.[9] The mental health pressures were contextualised by evidence released in May 2024 that, for example, by 2018 more than twice as many pupils as in 2012 talked of feeling lonely at school.[10] Research involving more than a million school-age children in England carried out by Loughborough University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS), released in September 2025, also concluded that ‘… the more times a child is absent from school, the greater the probability they will experience mental ill health’. [11]

With high levels of NEETs persisting[12] – confirmed in March 2025 by updated Government statistics that, among 16-24 year olds since 2023, they had risen by 1.5 per cent[13] – Sharon Smith of the education consultancy Tute Education in May 2026 urged ‘education leaders’ to ‘… consider absence (from school) as a warning of higher Neet risk’.[14] At that month’s launch of the initial report on the government’s enquiry into the youth unemployment crisis, Peter Hyman, a former adviser to Tony Blair and Keir Starmer, also talked of schools becoming the ‘pipeline’ to the worklessness being experienced by many young people and called on the government to enact radical educational reform to address the NEET ‘national scandal’.[15]

Exclusions

Framing many schools’ approach throughout this period were the education reforms in the early 2010s of the then Education Secretary Michael Give which included encouraging teachers ‘… to introduce children to “healthy fear”’. These were seen, too, as being underpinned by what was later labelled teachers’ own ‘… devout belief in zero-tolerance discipline’.[16]

It was against this background that by 2022 rates of suspensions from schools had reached a peak of 296 for every 10,000 pupils.[17] By the middle of 2024 a Guardian analysis was revealing that, post the pandemic, 50 secondary schools had suspended more than a quarter of their pupils, with those attending schools catering for the most ‘disadvantaged’ emerging as three times as likely to get suspended as those living in wealthier areas.[18]

In September 2024, the findings were published of research carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and The Difference – a charity committed to ‘supporting schools to develop expertise that reduces exclusion and absence’. These showed that, overall, both permanent and temporary exclusions had risen by more than a third in the previous year – to 17 per cent. This, together with the levels of ‘unauthorised absence’, had resulted in pupils of all ages losing a record 32 million days of learning – 72 per cent higher than in the last full school year before the pandemic. Most likely to be affected were SEND children, those entitled to free school meals and those from an ethnic backgrounds. Even short suspensions from school could result in pupils getting poorer GCSE grades than their peers, including failing to achieve a standard pass in maths and English. It was also more likely that a pupil with SEND needs would find themselves suspended. [19]

By mid 2025 figures from a survey of nearly 200 ‘leaders’ of trusts and multi-academy school trusts added significant detail to these findings:

-80 per cent reported deteriorating pupil behaviour since Covid;

-45 per cent said suspension and exclusions had increased over the 12 months to May 2025;

-38 per cent described these issues as their biggest challenge, followed by a lack of alternative options for the pupils affected (33 per cent) and a lack of support for SEND pupils (16 per cent).

These findings correlated with DfE data for the spring term of 2023-24 which recorded a 12 per cent rise to 295,559 in suspensions annually, with permanent exclusions up by 2 per cent to 3,107.[20]

Early in 2025, a study carried out by a multi-ethnic team of academics at Durham and Birmingham universities suggested that key causative factors here were poverty and special education needs rather than ethnicity. This conclusion was however questioned by other researchers in the field who argued that it ‘… played down the complex intersection of ethnicity and class that deprives children of fair access to educational opportunities’.[21] It was challenged, too, by the findings of a UCL study published in September that year which concluded that white pupils from low-income families in England were starting secondary school with far lower levels of enthusiasm and effort than those from other ethnic groups.[22]

Attainment levels: Overall statistics

By April 2024 Nuffield Foundation research was predicting that, compared with the 45 per cent of pupils who in 2023 were getting grade 5s in GCSE English and maths, the rate would fall to below 40 per cent for children who were aged 5 at the time of the Covid school closures.[23] Following the pandemic, for GCSE students in the 16 to 19 education group the attainment gap between ‘disadvantaged’ pupils and their peers had by then already widened by 3.6 per cent – the biggest disparity since 2012.[24]

‘Disadvantage’

By March 2025 the Education Policy Institute (EPI) was describing as ‘disturbing’ the rates at which ‘disadvantaged’ pupils were falling behind their peers. It for example recorded that between 2019 and 2023 the attainment gap at the age of 16 had grown to 18.6 months and that in this period the gap between SEND-supported reception pupils and their peers had also increased – by 0.7 months. It concluded that unauthorised school absences were ‘a leading cause’ of this widening gap and that if these ‘disadvantaged’ pupils had achieved the same attendance record as other pupils the attainment gap could have been nearly 10 per cent narrower at age 11 and 20 per cent narrower at 16.[25]

Gender disparities

Though in early April 2025 the Children’s Commissioner for England warned of a risk of pitting boys and girls against each other, evidence did emerge of some significant outcome differences between them. A Centre for Social Justice ‘Lost Boys’ report released in March 2025 concluded for example that in this generation, as ‘from nursery to university’ they were outperformed by girls, ‘it is boys who are being left behind’. However, according to one girl’s comment recorded by a University of Manchester researcher, one consequence of this could be: ‘Well, that’s quite a lot of pressure, actually… There’s this assumption that we’re fine”’[26]

Regional and class inequalities

Compared to pre-pandemic, in this period in the different regions of England GCSE results either changed little or worsened. With London still showing better results than the rest of the country and the north-east continuing to have the lowest level of top grades, it was the results in the West Midlands which by 2023 were declining the most, to their lowest rate. Revealing here, too, was that, at 21 per cent and 19 per cent respectively, the proportion of students from for academies and comprehensive schools who were getting a grade 7 or above was well below the 48 per cent of students from private schools.[27]

One study published in November 2024 did suggest that pupils in private and state schools in England were by then achieving the same GCSE results[28]. Other findings, however, in effect pointed still to significant regional disparities. In an interview with the Guardian published in October 2024, for example, the UK’s social mobility commissioner concluded that a child growing up in a poorer area of London had a much better chance of going to university and getting a good job than one from the north-east.[29]

Figures released by the DfE the following month also revealed that the proportion of 15 year old pupils eligible for free school meals who went on to university had actually fallen slightly – from 29.2 per cent to 29 per cent.[30] Repeatedly absent pupils also ended up with lower examination grades, with only 11 per cent classified as ‘severely absent’ for example getting above grade 4 in English and maths compared with 68 per cent of all pupils.[31]

Government responses

In April 2024 the DfE claimed that almost £5 billion had been made available since 2020 for ‘education recovery initiatives’ which, it claimed, had ‘supported millions of pupils in need of extra support’. It also pointed to the pupil premium for disadvantaged pupils – introduced in 2011, paid annually to schools for each pupil eligible for free school meals and due to rise to a total of almost £2.9 billion in 2024-25. As ‘the highest in cash terms since this funding began’, the premium was described as additional to an ongoing £10m behaviour hubs programme and the £9.5m available for up to 7,800 schools and colleges to train ‘a senior mental health lead. [32]

Nonetheless by March 2025 a spokesperson for the DfE was acknowledging that, having ‘inherited a system with a number of baked-in inequalities…’ the Labour government’s top priority would be to get more pupils actually to attend school regularly.[33] Within a month it was also promising to tackle England’s ‘entrenched’ educational divides in A-level results[34] and, by the end of the year, to provide extra training for teachers as part of a wider multi-million ‘investment’ to tackle misogyny in England’s schools.[35]

By then, however, evidence had emerged that over the previous year school exclusion had risen by a fifth, with each permanently excluded child costing the taxpayer £170,000.[36] An independent evaluation of one of the DfE-funded ‘attendance monitors’ schemes had also concluded that, though in its first year attendance of half the pupils involved had improved, for 36 per cent it had actually worsened.[37] Confirming the link between pupils’ absences and their lower attainment levels, research carried out by EPI and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), illustrated how and when, in the words of the latter’s Chief Executive, ‘the (disadvantage) gap takes hold in children’s lives, and how quickly it can become entrenched’.[38]

For this post, the conclusion surely, therefore, has to echo that of the last one, on young people’s place in the labour market: that here too, in dealing with their engagement in and responses to schooling, there is ‘a mountain to climb’. When looked at from a youth worker perspective, for national policies as well as for how the schools themselves operate, some (clearly often challenging) first steps might include:

-Moving away from that ‘zero-tolerance-around-behaviour’ approach and its built-in risks not only of stifling young people’s voices and experiences but of adding to their mental health pressures.

-Seeking instead to develop more personalised approaches which start from a focus on who these pupils are – individually but also in their group alignments – and on their educational potential beyond just ‘the academic’.

-Providing resources which allow – indeed prompt – greater attention to:

-the class, gender and ethnicity factors which help shape so many young people’s responses to their schooling;

-what, day-by-day and week-by-week, ‘special educational needs’ may require of a school and its staff;

-the wider if often only implicit messages brought by pupils who are on free school meals.

-Creating more outward-reaching roles within schools which enable – prompt – more dedicated responses to those young people who resist attendance.

-Giving a much higher and more explicit priority within the training of teachers to relationship-focused approaches such as these.

Bernard Davies

July 2026

[1] Bernard Davies, 2024, ‘Youth Work Policies in England 2019-2023: Can Open Youth Work Survive?’, palgrave macmillan, Chapter 2

[2] GOV.UK, 2025, Explore education statistics, 26 June, https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/participation-in-education-and-training-and-employment/2024

[3] Sally Weale, Richard Adams and Pamela Duncan, 2025, ‘Rise in top grades shows pupils have bounced back from the pandemic’, Guardian, 22 August

[4] Richard Adams, 2024, ‘Record numbers of pupils in England absent for long periods, DfE data shows’, Guardian, 21 March; Children and Young People’s Mental Health Commission/Centre for Mental Health, 2024, NOT IN SCHOOL – THE MENTAL HEALTH BARRIERS TO SCHOOL ATTENDANCE, April, https://cypmhc.org.uk/publications/not-in-school/ April; Richard Adams, 2025, ‘Unauthorised school absence widening “disadvantage gap” in England’, Guardian, 17 March

[5]  Richard Adams, 2024, op cit , 21 March

[6] Joe Lepper, 2024, ‘Thousands of vulnerable children missing from education, de Souza warns’, CYPN, 11 September

[7] Richard Adams, 2024, op cit, Guardian, 21 March  ‘

[8] Richard Adams, 2025, ‘Girls in England feel less safe at school than they did pre-Covid, survey finds’, Guardian, 4 April

[9] Children and Young People’s Mental Health Commission/Centre for Mental Health, April, 2024, op cit

[10] Sophie McBain, 2024, ‘The lonely land: Why are so many children feeling so isolated?’, The New Statesman, 3-9 May

[11] Richard Adams, 2025, ‘School absence a big factor in child mental illness in England, data shows’, Guardian, 9 September

[12] See my June 2026 blog post at https://chilypep.org.uk/meet-the-team/bernard-davies/open-youth-work-matters-blog/. See also ‘Young People and Work Report: Call for Evidence’, Updated 23 December 2025, file:///C:/Users/Owner/Favorites/Desktop/Documents/PolicyPapersetc%20-%20Copy/Yp/Young%20People%20and%20Work%20Report_%20Call%20for%20Evidence%20-%20GOV.UK.html

[13] GOV.UK, 2025, NEET age 16 to 24, Calendar year 2024 – Explore education statistics, 20 March, https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/neet-statistics-annual-brief/2024

[14] Sharon Smith, 2026, ‘Attendance should be treated as Neet early warning indicator’, CYPN, 7 May

[15] Alexandra Topping and Richard Partington, 2026, ‘Schools are “pipeline” to joblessness for many young people, says ex-Labour adviser’, Guardian, 21 May

[16] John Harris, 2024, ‘What kind of society would willingly traumatise its children in the name of education?’, Guardian, 16 December

[17] Richard Adams, 2024, ‘Students suspended even for short spells fare worse at GCSEs, study finds, Guardian, 14 March

[18] Carmen Aguilar Garcia, 2024, ‘Fifty English secondary schools suspend more that a quarter of pupils after pandemic’, Guardian, 25 August

[19] Richard Adams, 2024, ‘Students suspended even for short spells fare worse at GCSEs, study finds, Guardian, 14 March; See also Joe Lepper, 2024, ‘School exclusions up by a fifth over last year’, CYPN, 5 September

[20] Joanne Parkes, 2025, ‘Pupil exclusions and suspensions ‘near all-time high’, CYPN, 7 July

[21] Richard Adams, 2025, ‘Ethnicity not a key factor in England school exclusions, study foinds’, Guardian, 31 January

[22] Richard Adams, 2025, ‘White low-income pupils “report lowest enthusiasm for school” in England’, Guardian, 25 September

[23] Richard Adams, 2024, ‘’Pupils in England “facing worst exam results in decades”, after Covid closures’, Guardian, 24 April

[24] Amelia Hill, 2024, ‘Young people in UK having to refuse jobs due to high costs, report finds’, Guardian, 28 January

[25] Joanne Parkes, 2025, ‘Soaring school absence behind growing attainment gap, report finds’, CYPN, 17 March; Richard Adams, 2025, ‘Unauthorised school absence widening “disadvantage gap” in England’, Guardian, 17 March

[26] Alexandra Topping, 2025, ‘Both girls and boys are facing pressures as previous generations did not, warn experts’, Guardian, 12 April

[27] Richard Adams and Alex Clark, 2024, ‘England’s GCSE results show ingrained social and regional inequality post-Covid’, Guardian, 22 August

[28] Sally Weale, 2024, ‘Private and state school pupils’ GCSE results are now the same, study finds’, Guardian, 21 November

[29] Patrick Butler, 2024, ‘Social mobility in UK’s poorest areas “falling further behind”’, Guardian, 11 September

[30] Richard Adams, 2024, ‘Alarm at first fall in disadvantaged students in England reaching university’, Guardian, 24 October

[31] Richard Adams, 2024, ‘Record numbers of pupils in England absent for long periods, DfE data shows’, Guardian, 21 March  ‘

[32] Richard Adams, 2024, ‘Pupils in England “facing worst exam results in decades”, after Covid closures’, Guardian, 24 April

[33] Richard Adams, 2025, ‘Unauthorised school absence widening “disadvantage gap” in England’, Guardian, 17 March

[34] Richard Adams, 2025, ‘Ministers vow to tackle England’s “entrenched divides” in A-level results’, Guardian, 14 August

[35] Alexandra Topping and Rajeev Syal, 2025, ‘Teachers to be given extra training as Keir Starmer warns “toxic ideas are taking hold early and going unchallenged”’, Guardian, 18 December

[36] Joe Lepper, 2024, ‘School exclusions up by a fifth over last year’, CYPN, 5 September

[37] Richard Adams, 2024, ‘Record numbers of pupils in England absent for long periods, DfE data shows’, Guardian, 21 March  ‘

[38] Derren Hayes, 2026, ‘Five key factors widening the attainment gap’, CYPN, 11 June