Attendance Is Not Achievement: Rethinking Causality in UK Schools

Some thoughts scribbled in the free response box of another survey, responding to school's obsession with measuring attendance data (and poor discussion of other underlying performance factors)

Across the UK, school leaders and policymakers increasingly repeat a simple mantra: attendance equals attainment. Parents are routinely asked to agree with statements such as, “Good school attendance is directly linked to better academic achievement for my child.” On the surface, this appears unobjectionable. Who could be against children attending school? Yet the language used – “directly linked” – reveals a deeper problem. It blurs the crucial distinction between correlation and causation, reducing a complex educational ecosystem to a crude behavioural metric. “Linked” is a deliberately vague word. In statistical terms, attendance and attainment are correlated: pupils who attend more often, on average, achieve higher grades. But correlation does not demonstrate that attendance itself causes higher achievement. Both may instead be effects of other underlying factors. Socio-demographic background, parental involvement, household stability, access to books, exposure to arts and culture, health, nutrition, and emotional wellbeing all shape both how often a child attends school and how well they perform academically. Families with greater resources and stability are more likely to ensure consistent attendance and to provide enrichment beyond the classroom. Attendance, in many cases, may be a proxy indicator for broader structural advantages.

Yet schools increasingly frame attendance as though it were the primary causal lever. This is administratively convenient: attendance is measurable, reportable, and subject to sanctions. Parental reading habits, cultural exposure, or levels of emotional security are not. Reducing educational outcomes to “good attendance = better achievement” substitutes statistical simplification for genuine analysis. It also shifts responsibility onto families in a way that obscures structural inequality. When attendance becomes the dominant explanatory factor, the far more difficult work of addressing poverty, mental health provision, special educational needs support, or community resources recedes from view. The obsession with attendance also rests on an unexamined assumption: that schooling and education are synonymous. As often attributed to Mark Twain, one should not let schooling interfere with one’s education. Whether or not the phrasing is apocryphal, the distinction is valuable. Schooling is an institutional process; education is the development of understanding, curiosity, judgement, and intellectual independence. The two overlap, but they are not identical.

In some cases, schooling can actively obstruct education. A child experiencing anxiety, bullying, unmet special educational needs, or a curriculum that feels alienating may learn very little from physical presence alone. Compulsory attendance in such circumstances may increase distress without improving learning. Conversely, a child temporarily absent due to illness, family circumstances, or alternative enrichment activities may continue to learn effectively outside school walls. Presence is not equivalent to engagement; seat time is not the same as cognitive growth. By treating attendance as a universal good, schools risk ignoring the qualitative conditions that make schooling educative rather than merely supervisory. The real question is not simply how often a child is present, but under what conditions schooling supports intellectual development. Is the classroom inclusive? Is teaching responsive? Are children emotionally secure? Do they feel respected? Do they encounter stimulating ideas? Without these, attendance becomes compliance rather than education. Moreover, the fixation on attendance encourages punitive responses. Fines and threats of legal action position families as problems to be managed. This is particularly troubling given that lower attendance rates are disproportionately concentrated among disadvantaged groups. When attendance is framed as a moral failing rather than a complex outcome shaped by socio-economic realities, schools risk compounding inequality rather than mitigating it.

None of this is to argue that attendance is irrelevant. Of course sustained absence can limit access to structured teaching and peer interaction. But acknowledging correlation is different from asserting direct causation. Educational achievement emerges from a constellation of interacting variables. Treating attendance as the master variable oversimplifies that reality. A more intellectually honest approach would recognise attendance as one indicator among many, not a magic bullet. It would also invite a broader conversation: what conditions transform schooling into genuine education? How do we support families in ways that address underlying causes rather than merely policing symptoms? And how do we avoid mistaking administrative measurability for educational meaning? The current obsession with attendance reflects a managerial logic: what can be counted can be controlled. But education resists such reduction. When schools conflate correlation with causation, they not only misrepresent the evidence; they risk narrowing our understanding of what education is for. The challenge is not simply to increase attendance percentages, but to ensure that when children are present, schooling truly serves their education rather than getting in its way.