All schools in England to get pupil attendance targets, government says

Every mainstream state school in England will be given their own target to improve pupil attendance, the government has confirmed.

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. That includes both authorised absences, such as illness, and unauthorised absences, which is when pupils miss school without permission or a valid reason.

The rates of persistent absence have doubled since the pandemic. A pupil is described as persistently absent if they miss at least 10% of school sessions.

In 2018/19, persistent absence rates for England state schools were around 10%, while the most recent data showed it was at 19% in 2025/26.