Sep 9 / Sunshine Support

School Avoidance: Behind Every Attendance Figure Is a Child

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When we talk about school attendance, we tend to talk in numbers.

Percentages. Sessions missed. Persistent absence. Authorised absence. Unauthorised absence.

Those figures matter. Children and young people deserve meaningful access to education, and prolonged periods away from education can have significant consequences.

But numbers can only tell us that a child isn't attending.

They cannot always tell us why.

New research carried out by Sunshine Support as part of School Avoidance Awareness Week 2026 suggests that, for many families experiencing school attendance difficulties, the story began long before a child stopped walking through the school gates.

Perhaps it is time that our national conversation about attendance became a conversation about children, too.

The National Picture

School absence remains a significant issue in England.

The Department for Education's latest detailed absence statistics show that 18.1% of pupils were persistently absent during the autumn term of 2025/26, meaning they missed 10% or more of their possible school sessions. That's approximately 1.29 million pupils.

A further 151,000 pupils were severely absent, meaning they missed at least half of their possible sessions.

The figures become even more striking when we look at children with SEND.

In autumn 2025/26, persistent absence stood at 35.61% for pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) and 28.49% for pupils receiving SEN Support, compared with 16.75% for pupils with no identified SEN.

These statistics tell us something important.

But they should also make us curious.

Rather than asking only:

"How do we improve attendance?"

Perhaps we also need to ask:

"Why are so many children struggling to attend in the first place?"

We Asked Families What Was Happening Behind the Numbers

During the summer of 2026, Sunshine Support asked parents and carers with current or previous experience of school attendance difficulties to tell us about their children's experiences.

The survey ran for 11 weeks and received eligible responses relating to 1,103 children's experiences.

This wasn't designed to be a nationally representative prevalence study, and the findings shouldn't be interpreted as telling us what is happening to every child experiencing attendance difficulties.

Instead, this is lived-experience evidence: more than a thousand families telling us what happened to them.

We didn't undertake the research to prove that there is one cause of school avoidance.

There isn't.

Nor was it designed to blame schools, teachers, or individual professionals.

We wanted to look behind the attendance figure.

What was happening before attendance deteriorated?

What did families believe was contributing?

How quickly were concerns recognised?

What happened when they asked for help?

The answers paint a much more complicated picture than a child simply refusing to go to school.

Attendance Was Often the End of the Story, Not the Beginning

One of the most important findings from our research was that, for many children, there were already signs of difficulty before their attendance deteriorated.

Before attendance became difficult, 31.9% of children were described as regularly showing signs of distress, 23.1% as frequently anxious, and 23.9% as occasionally reluctant.

Only 19.3% were described as happy to attend beforehand.

That matters.

Because if we wait until a child's attendance falls below a particular percentage before we become concerned, we may be waiting far too long.

The attendance figure might not be the first warning sign.

It might be one of the last.

A child may still be physically arriving at school whilst finding the experience increasingly difficult.

They might be anxious on Sunday evening.

Sleep might become difficult.

They might complain of feeling unwell each morning.

There might be distress or emotional overwhelm once they return home.

They might repeatedly ask whether they really have to go tomorrow.

None of those experiences necessarily appear in an attendance percentage while a child is still managing to walk through the school gates.

But they matter.

And they may represent an opportunity to act before difficulties become entrenched.

What Is Making School Difficult to Access?

We also asked families what they believed was contributing to their child's attendance difficulties.

There wasn't one simple answer.

The school environment was identified by 82.9% of respondents. This category included things such as noise, sensory demands, routines, transitions and expectations.

Safety was identified by 59.7%, systems and policies by 55.5%, relationships by 54.1% and learning by 47.9%.

Perhaps even more significantly, 78.9% of respondents selected at least two contributing factors.

This is important because school avoidance can sometimes be discussed as though it is one problem requiring one solution.

Get the child through the door.

Improve the morning routine.

Increase attendance.

But what if the difficulty is being created by several things at once?

Noise.

Sensory overwhelm.

Transitions.

Academic demands.

Friendship difficulties.

Feeling unsafe.

Behaviour policies.

A lack of appropriate adjustments.

Anxiety.

If a child is experiencing several of these things simultaneously, perhaps they don't simply need more encouragement to tolerate them.

Perhaps we need to understand which barriers we can remove.

The Government's Figures Should Make Us More Curious, Not Less Compassionate

This is where the national statistics and the experiences shared with us become particularly interesting.

Government data shows that absence is disproportionately high amongst children with SEND.

The Department for Education reported that, in spring 2025/26, the overall absence rate was 13.59% amongst pupils with an EHCP and 10% amongst pupils receiving SEN Support, compared with 5.69% amongst pupils with no identified SEN.

Our research cannot tell us that SEND causes school avoidance.

Nor can we take the experiences of the families in our survey and use them to explain every child represented within the Government's figures.

But surely, when we see such substantial differences between groups of children, it should prompt questions.

If some children are much more likely to struggle with attendance, is the most useful response simply to place greater pressure on those children and their families to attend?

Or should we also be asking what it is about their experience of education that might be making attendance difficult?

That's where sympathy and understanding become incredibly important.

A child experiencing school avoidance isn't necessarily a child who doesn't value education.

A parent struggling to get their child through the school gates isn't necessarily a parent who doesn't value attendance.

Sometimes they are families desperately trying to maintain access to education whilst their child is telling them, in every way they know how, that something isn't working.

What Happens When We Don't Recognise It?

Perhaps one of the findings that should give us greatest pause is how long families reported waiting for their child's difficulties to be recognised.

For 49.8% of respondents, recognition took at least a year or had still not happened at the time of the survey.

Only 21% reported recognition within three months.

Think about what a year means in the life of a child.

A year of difficult mornings.

A year of anxiety.

A year of trying to cope.

A year in which relationships between home and school can become increasingly strained.

And potentially a year in which something that might once have been manageable becomes entrenched.

Families overwhelmingly believed there had been an opportunity to act sooner.

When asked whether earlier appropriate support could have reduced their child's attendance difficulties, 56.2% said yes and 36.4% said maybe.

Together, that's 92.7%.

That doesn't prove that earlier intervention would have prevented school avoidance in every case.

But it gives us a very good reason to listen earlier.

The Impact Doesn't Stop at the School Gate

There is another part of school avoidance that attendance statistics cannot easily capture.

What happens at home.

In our research, 88.5% of families reported anxiety as an impact of their child's attendance difficulties.

Sixty-five per cent reported social isolation.

Almost half reported financial difficulties.

And 765 respondents reported reducing their working hours, leaving employment, or both.

These aren't insignificant consequences.

Behind an attendance percentage can be a parent changing their working hours.

A family cancelling plans because their child cannot cope.

Relationships under pressure.

Financial worries.

Parents lying awake wondering what tomorrow morning will bring.

Children who want things to be different but don't know how to make that happen.

This is why sympathy matters.

It's why language matters.

And it's why blame rarely moves us closer to a solution.

Pressure Isn't the Same as Support

We also asked families what happened when attendance first became difficult.

Almost two-thirds said the initial response focused on attendance or enforcement, or that they received little to no support. Only 15.1% selected one of the two clearly supportive predefined responses in the survey.

Again, our research doesn't allow us to conclude that these responses caused later attendance difficulties.

But it does raise an important question.

If a child's absence is communicating that something has become difficult or inaccessible, what do we achieve by responding only to the absence?

Imagine a child struggling because they don't feel safe, cannot manage the sensory environment, or are overwhelmed by the demands being placed upon them.

Increasing pressure to attend doesn't necessarily change any of those things.

The original barrier is still there.

This isn't an argument for giving up on education.

Quite the opposite.

It's an argument for making education accessible again.

Curiosity, Not Judgement

None of this means attendance doesn't matter.

It matters enormously.

Children have a right to education, friendships, opportunities, learning, and a future.

But perhaps we need to separate access to education from the idea that success can only be measured by getting a child physically into a particular building every morning.

If a child cannot currently access education safely and sustainably, the question cannot stop at:

"How do we make them attend?"

We need to ask:

What happened?

When did things begin to change?

What is this child experiencing?

Do they feel safe?

What are they telling us through their behaviour?

What barriers can we remove?

What needs to change so that education becomes accessible again?

The families who contributed to our research repeatedly returned to this idea. They asked schools, local authorities and government to look at the whole child rather than attendance data alone, to listen to parents and children, and to approach difficulties with curiosity rather than blame.

Behind Every Number Is a Child

The Government's attendance statistics tell us something important.

School absence remains a significant national issue. In autumn 2025/26, 18.1% of pupils were persistently absent and 2.12% severely absent. Both figures had increased from the previous autumn term.

The Sunshine Support research adds another perspective.

It tells us about children who were showing distress before their attendance collapsed.

Families who believed multiple barriers were contributing.

Parents who felt recognition came too late.

And households experiencing consequences that reached far beyond education.

It doesn't give us one simple explanation for school avoidance.

In fact, its conclusion is almost the opposite.

Families described multiple and overlapping barriers involving environment, safety, systems and policies, relationships and learning. For many children, distress was visible before attendance became significantly disrupted.

And perhaps that's precisely why our response needs to change.

We shouldn't need to wait for attendance to collapse before we become curious.

We shouldn't need a child to reach crisis before their distress becomes important.

And we shouldn't look at a struggling family and immediately ask who is to blame.

Instead, we can ask a better question:

What does this child need in order to access education safely, meaningfully and sustainably?

Because attendance matters.

But behind every attendance figure is a child.

And the child matters more.