Four-year-olds put in truancy league tables

SCHOOL league tables will be overhauled to monitor the attendance records of children as young as four, amid fears that many are developing bad habits.

Charlie Taylor, the Government’s behaviour tsar, warned that ‘a lot of the patterns of poor attendance start very early on’.

He said primary schools must ‘get stuck in earlier’ and tackle the problem at reception level, which is for four and five-year-olds.

They should start ‘working out which of the parents are beginning to slip into bad habits’ as soon as possible, he added.

However, there will be no penalties for absence from school at reception level, as attendance is not compulsory until the term after a child turns five.

Mr Taylor hopes the inclusion of the data will expose primary schools that fail to challenge pupils who regularly don’t turn up because they suffer from ‘a bit of a sniffle’.

He said: ‘Often parents feel that they’re being good parents by keeping their child off school but actually sometimes they can be a bit trigger-happy.’

While stressing that children should be kept off for ‘something that’s really serious’, he added: ‘I think it’s about, “If in doubt, send them to school”.’

The move comes amid a general clampdown on term-time holidays, with primary and secondary head teachers being told to allow them only in ‘exceptional circumstances’.

Mr Taylor, who is head of The Willows, a special school in West London, spoke out as he published a report on attendance, commissioned by Education Secretary Michael Gove after last summer’s riots.

At present, primary schools collect data for the Government on authorised and unauthorised absence for pupils from Year One (ages five to six) onwards.

However, the Government has accepted Mr Taylor’s recommendation for extra data on absence levels for reception classes to be collected from 2013.

Mr Taylor also stressed that patterns of truancy can begin even earlier, in nursery class, which is for three and four-year-olds, although absence figures at this level will not yet be included in league tables.

He said: ‘When we think about attendance and truancy, people think of 15-year- olds bunking off school and smoking in the town centre. But actually what we’ve discovered is that the children who end up playing traditional “truant” are children who had very poor patterns of behaviour very early on.’

He added that the best primary schools tackled the problem ‘incredibly aggressively’, citing one in South London, that ‘very harshly’ refuses to admit nursery children who arrive late. It has up to 97 per cent attendance levels across the school.