The summer GCSE exam season is now just around the corner for a whole new cohort of Yorkshire students.
All candidates and their families will have worked hard, and will no doubt be hoping to do well. But just how well they do can be highly influenced by their attendance - and when it comes to keeping pupil absence rates low, some local secondary schools shine especially bright.
A recent Department for Education report has found that pupils who attended school nearly every day in Year 11 were almost twice as likely to achieve a Grade 5 in their English and Maths GCSEs as those who only attended 90 to 95% of the time. This means that missing just 10 days of school reduces the likelihood of getting a strong pass by around 50%.
The Government has now released its full absence and attendance figures for the most recent 2023/24 school year. Despite showing a small improvement on last year, the overall absence rate - the percentage of half-days missed for all pupils - still lingers well above pre-pandemic figures. The amount of ‘persistently absent’ pupils missing at least 10% of these half-day sessions also remains incredibly high - affecting 1 in 5 children.
Included with the Government’s attendance figures was the absence data for each state-funded secondary school in England. This meant we were able to see which schools had the country’s lowest overall absence rates. We’ve now taken a closer look at how South Yorkshire’s schools have performed across the Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster and Sheffield City council areas, to create a league table of those with the lowest rates of pupils missing class for any reason.
We’ve only included schools with absence rates of 7.5% or lower, an outstanding achievement for any school community, while private and special schools have been excluded. It will likely come as no surprise that many were also featured amongst South Yorkshire’s top schools for GCSE performance in the last school year.
Here were the 13 local secondary schools that met our criteria:
1. Mercia School
At the top of the list is Mercia, a secondary free school and sixth form in Sheffield, known for having high standards for pupil behaviour. It had the second highest GCSEs-based Progress 8 score of any school in England last year - and also earned a spot on our list of the country’s overall top schools for attendance. In the 2023/24 school year, it had an absence rate of just 3.27%. | Google
2. Doncaster UTC
This is a university technical college in Doncaster, with ties to both the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University. It takes pupils from the age of 13. In the 2023/24 school year, it had an absence rate of 5.06%. | Google
3. St Bernard's Catholic High School
St Bernard’s is a Catholic secondary academy in Rotherham, which has an ‘above average’ Progress 8 score. In the 2023/24 school year, it had an absence rate of 5.89%. | Google
4. High Storrs School
High Storrs is another high-performing secondary academy and sixth form in Sheffield, with a ‘well above average’ Progress 8 score off the back of last year’s GCSE results. In the 2023/24 school year, it had an absence rate of about 6%. | Google