We can also see that pupils with the lowest absence rates in Year 6 tended to see their absence increase in Year 7 whether they were disadvantaged or not (albeit disadvantaged pupils saw bigger increases than non-disadvantaged pupils). But among pupils with higher absence rates, disadvantaged pupils tended to see further increases in Year 7, while non-disadvantaged pupils tended to see falls.
We can see this pattern more clearly by america rcs data plotting the average change in absence between Year 6 and 7 by Year 6 absence rate and disadvantage.
Patterns of absence
absence experienced by disadvantaged pupils isn’t solely down to the amount of absence they experienced in Year 6. So let’s turn to their patterns of absence.
We’ve seen before that persistently absent pupils with the same overall absence rates are more likely to stay persistently absent if they’d had lots of short spells of absence than if they’d had one or two longer spells.
Perhaps disadvantaged pupils tended to be off more frequently than other pupils, even if they had the same overall rates of absence.
To explore this, let’s plot the percentage of pupils by the number of spells of absence they had in Year 6, split by disadvantage. Firstly, for all pupils: