Can't, not won't: What school attendance fines get wrong about SEND children

17 Sept

Ask a headteacher why attendance matters and you'll get the same answer everywhere: children can't learn if they're not in the classroom. It's true, and it's also the wrong place to start with a family who has already tried everything to get their child through the gate.

The numbers on who's actually missing school make for uncomfortable reading. In the most recent DfE data broken down by special educational needs, pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan had an absence rate of 13.9%, against 6.1% for pupils with no identified SEN. For persistent absence the gap widens further: 35.7% of children with an EHC plan missed 10% or more of school, compared with 18.1% of children with no SEN. The Centre for Social Justice's most recent termly tracker puts it even more starkly: children with an EHCP are 5.6 times more likely to be severely absent than their peers, and nearly 1 in 12 were absent from school more often than they attended.

Meanwhile, penalty notices for absence keep climbing. The DfE recorded 492,800 penalty notices issued in 2024/25, a 1% rise on the year before and part of a trend that predates the pandemic. What that data doesn't show is who they're landing on. There is no national breakdown by SEN status, because the DfE doesn't collect one. Ask a local authority the same question under the Freedom of Information Act and the honest answer, in my experience, is usually "information not held." Councils aren't hiding this. Nobody is counting it, which means nobody has to explain it.

That gap matters because a fine assumes a particular story: a parent who could send their child to school and chose not to. For a lot of SEND families, that isn't the story at all. It's a child who cannot walk through a door that has become, for entirely real reasons, impossible. Ross Greene's line has stuck with me through 34 years of watching this play out in schools: children do well if they can. Not if they want to. Struggling to attend school is rarely a motivation problem dressed up as a discipline one, and treating it as the latter is how a fine ends up punishing a family for a difficulty the system hasn't yet worked out how to meet.

What actually helps, this week

If you are the parent standing in that hallway: don't force it, and don't assume the fine letter means you've failed. Ask what's making the door impossible, not whether your child is willing to walk through it. Ask the school for what's actually happening for your child in the building, in writing, not just what the attendance percentage says. If a fine notice does arrive, know that "information not held" is the honest answer most councils would give if asked how many of those notices go to families exactly like yours.

And when you do sit down with the school, don't let the conversation end when the meeting does. Open it properly: say plainly what isn't working and what you need to understand. Then ask for it to be recorded, not just minuted in general terms, but with specific actions, who's doing each one, and a date by which it should be done. A review date matters as much as the action itself. Without one, "we'll look into it" has a habit of quietly becoming nothing at all.

None of this needs to be adversarial to work. You can ask for dates and follow-up in a perfectly friendly email the same afternoon: "Lovely to talk this morning, just so we're all clear, here's what we agreed and when." That single message does more to hold a school to its word than any amount of frustration in the room, and it costs you nothing but five minutes.

The schooling system does not work for many of our children right now. That's not a reason to stop asking it to. It's the reason to ask in a way that leaves a paper trail behind you.

I have spent 34 years in UK schools, including as a SENCo, before founding ADHD in Practice.