Written question asked by Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour) on Friday, 7 January 2011, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Tuesday, 11 January 2011. It was answered by Nick Gibb (Conservative) on Thursday, 3 February 2011 on behalf of the Department for Education.

Pupils: Absenteeism

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Education what recent analysis has been undertaken of geographical variations in levels of unauthorised absences from (a) primary and (b) secondary schools.

Answer: The most recent analysis on unauthorised absence has been published as part of the Statistical First Release (SFR) ““Pupil Absence in Schools in England: Autumn Term 2009 and Spring Term 2010””. This is available on our Research and Statistics Gateway website at"http://www.education.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000962/index.shtml"This contains Government office region and local authority level analyses (in tables 6 and 7).Data for the academic year 2008/09 is available in the SFR ““Pupil Absence in Schools in England, Including Pupil Characteristics: 2008/09””, which can be found at"http://www.education.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000918/index.shtml"This contains Government office region and local authority level analyses (in tables 7.1 and 7.2) as well as tables relating pupil absence to school location and pupil residence by local authority district (tables 8.1 to 8.8).Additionally, we publish pupil residence absence data for various geographic area types on the Neighbourhood Statistics website at"http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/"These data are available for 2006/07, 2007/08 and 2008/09.

Secondary information