This trend is being sold as inevitable. It deserves more skepticism than it is getting.
England's schools are about to receive pupil attendance targets, and the policy is being presented as a straightforward fix to a genuine problem. Truancy costs the economy money. Absent students fall behind. Therefore, measurable attendance targets will solve both issues. The logic appears airtight. But beneath the surface, this policy represents a fundamental misreading of what attendance problems actually are, and risks creating perverse incentives that could harm the very students it aims to help.
Let's be clear about what we know: school attendance has declined since the pandemic, and some students are chronically absent. These facts are not in dispute. The question is whether numerical targets imposed on schools are the right lever to pull.
The government is betting that schools respond to targets by getting better at their core job of education. But institutional logic doesn't work that way. When you measure something and attach consequences to it, organizations optimize for the measurement, not necessarily the underlying goal. This is not a cynical observation. It is simply how human institutions behave under pressure.
Consider what happens when a school faces an attendance target but cannot address the root causes of absence. A student might be missing school because their family is struggling financially, because they face bullying, because they have undiagnosed learning difficulties, or because home circumstances are chaotic. These are real barriers to attendance. A target does not remove them. So what does the school do?
The risk is that schools begin managing the problem at the margins rather than solving it. There are softer ways to influence attendance figures that require no actual improvement in school quality or student circumstances. Some schools might become more aggressive about excluding students with poor records, pushing the problem elsewhere rather than solving it. Others might reclassify absences in ways that look better on paper. Still others might focus resources on students who are close to meeting targets, effectively writing off those who are furthest behind.
This is not speculation. We have seen this pattern repeatedly in education policy. When reading targets dominated English schools, teaching narrowed. When hospital waiting times became the primary metric, some procedures were deprioritized. When exam results drove school rankings, teaching to the test became standard practice. Systems respond to targets by optimizing for targets.
The deeper problem is that attendance targets treat a symptom as if it were a disease. The actual disease is why students stop going to school in the first place. Those reasons are often structural: poverty, mental health challenges, inadequate special educational needs support, family instability, and yes, sometimes poor school quality. A target might temporarily move a statistical needle. It cannot fix these things.
None of this is to say that attendance doesn't matter. It clearly does. Schools should absolutely be working to encourage students to show up. But there is a difference between schools prioritizing attendance as part of their mission and schools being held accountable via rigid targets that incentivize gaming the system.
A more honest approach would acknowledge that some attendance problems require resources and support outside the school's direct control. It would measure whether schools are genuinely engaging families and addressing barriers to attendance, rather than simply whether the percentages improve. It would allow schools flexibility to respond to local circumstances rather than a uniform national target.
Instead, we are rolling out a policy that assumes schools are the problem and that measurement is the solution. It is an appealing narrative because it appears to take action. But it confuses accountability with actual improvement, and treats a complex social problem as though it had a simple administrative fix.
The trend toward attendance targets is being sold as inevitable and necessary. It deserves more skepticism than it is getting.