—·Attendance & Persistent Absence

Nearly a million young people are out of work and education. The earliest reliable sign of it is a register mark in Year 8.

Not in education, employment or training — NEET — is a statistic about twenty-two-year-olds, and every response announced with this morning’s figure starts at twenty-two. The Department for Education has measured how much earlier a school can see it coming.

Empower Educators 27 August 2026 7 min read

Written from the ONS release of 27 August 2026 and the Department for Education’s own research, read from the published documents rather than from the reporting of them. Every figure is attributed below. Empower Educators is not affiliated with the ONS, the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions or the BBC.

A young woman sitting on a bed reading a printed page, a laptop open in front of her and more papers spread across the blanket

The Office for National Statistics published the figure this morning: 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were not in education, employment or training between April and June. Not in a job, not at school, college or university, and not on a training course — the statistics call it NEET. That is 13.0% of the age group, up 30,000 on the same quarter last year, and it arrives ahead of the second half of Alan Milburn’s review into why. ONS, Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), UK, 27 August 2026

It was reported, correctly, as a labour-market story. The Work and Pensions Secretary pointed to a Jobs Guarantee pilot, 300,000 more work experience placements, 50,000 more youth apprenticeship starts and a £3,000 incentive for employers who hire a young person who has been out of work for six months. As reported by the BBC, 27 August 2026

Every one of those responses begins after a young person is already out. The Jobs Guarantee reaches people who have been claiming Universal Credit and looking for work for eighteen months. The hiring incentive starts at six. That is not a criticism of either — it is what an employment programme is — but it does mean the entire published response operates at the far end of something that was visible a long way upstream.

How far upstream is not a matter of opinion. The Department for Education measured it.

The measurement nobody quoted

In March 2025 the DfE published The Impact of School Absence on Lifetime Earnings, an analysis by its own economists that linked the school registers of state-funded secondary pupils to what those same people were earning, claiming and doing at the age of 28. It is not a study about NEET, and it does not use the word. It is the closest thing anyone has published to a measurement of the distance between a mark on a register and the number the ONS printed this morning. DfE, The Impact of School Absence on Lifetime Earnings, March 2025

Two of its findings are about employment directly. Both compare pupils by how much school they missed across Years 7 to 11 — persistently absent meaning more than 10% of possible sessions, severely absent more than 50%.

Odds at age 28, by absence across Years 7 to 11
Outcome	Persistently absent	Severely absent
In sustained employment for 12 months	down ~60%	down ~75%
Receiving benefits	2.7× more likely	4.2× more likely

As published. The likelihood of sustained employment for twelve months falls by approximately 60% and 75%; the likelihood of receiving benefits rises by 2.7 and 4.2 times. Nothing here is derived.

The same report puts a price on a single day. One day of absence between Years 7 and 11 is associated with a reduction of 0.68% of a standard deviation in Attainment 8 — roughly one GCSE grade for every thirteen days — and, carried through the department’s existing lifetime earnings estimates, about £750 in future earnings at 2024 prices. For a pupil who is already persistently absent, the marginal day is worth about £650.

Those numbers deserve the caveat the report gives them, in its own words, and it is worth printing rather than paraphrasing:

We caution against overly strong causal interpretations of these findings.
DfE, The Impact of School Absence on Lifetime Earnings, March 2025

That is the honest position and this article holds to it. Absence is entangled with poverty, illness, special educational need and everything else that also predicts being out of work at 22. The claim here is not that absence causes it. The claim is narrower and harder to argue with: the association is strong, it was measured, and it is legible to a school eight years before it is legible to anybody else.

The same young people, three times

Put the three moments on one axis and the shape of the problem is a timing problem.

Ages 11–16

Where the signal is recorded

Twice a day, every day, for five years. 18.14% of pupils were persistently absent in 2024/25 — missing more than a tenth of their possible sessions.

Ages 16–24

Where the count happens

981,000 young people, 13.0% of the age group, in April to June 2026. The responses announced alongside it begin six to eighteen months after a young person is already out.

Age 28

Where it was measured

The DfE matched school registers to tax records and asked what one day of absence in Years 7 to 11 was worth twelve years later.

One age axis, three published moments. The school band is the only one of the three that a school is inside — and it is also the earliest.

Read left to right, the register is the first instrument that touches this. It is also the only one of the three that runs continuously, costs nothing extra, and is already collected twice a day in every secondary school in the country.

What a school can actually see

And here is where the good news stops, because having the data is not the same as the data being useful. The instrument every school uses to act on absence is the persistent absence list, and it is built to identify pupils after the fact.

The persistent absence list identifies nobody early — a child reaches 90% only after missing nineteen days.
Every Day Counts, Confident Schools — the Notice pillar

Nineteen days is most of a half term. By the time the threshold flags a pupil, the pattern it is flagging has had a full term to establish itself, and the conversation that follows is about a habit rather than a wobble. The playbook’s argument is that the useful group is the one immediately above the line — the pupils at 90 to 95%, who are not on any list and who are the only cohort a term still has time to move.

Nationally that group is large. 18.14% of pupils in England were persistently absent in 2024/25 — down from 19.95% the year before, and still well above the 10.86% of 2018/19. Severe absence rose. DfE, Pupil absence in schools in England 2024/25, published 26 March 2026

Those are the children the ONS will be counting in eight years, and a school is the only institution currently in the room with them.

Four questions, from data you already hold

None of these needs a new system or a single additional collection. All four can be answered this half term from the register and the pastoral log.

1 Who is between 90% and 95% right now? Not the persistent absence list — the group above it. These are the pupils who will be on it by Christmas, and they are the only ones a term still has time to move.
2 How many days did it take to notice? Count back from the first conversation to the first absence. If the answer is nineteen days, the system is working exactly as designed and that is the problem.
3 Do you know why, or only how much? A percentage is not a reason. A school that cannot name the barrier for its twenty highest-absence pupils is managing a number rather than a child.
4 What happened to last year’s twenty? The only honest test of an attendance strategy. If nobody can say, the strategy has never been evaluated — it has only been run.

The fourth is the one schools avoid, and it is the only one that tells you whether any of the other three is working.

What this is not

It is not a claim that schools cause the NEET figure, and it is not a suggestion that a secondary school can fix a labour market. Milburn’s interim report put the rise down to health, the erosion of traditional employment routes and a widening gap in educational outcomes, and grounded the whole thing in social disadvantage. Those are national forces and no attendance strategy touches most of them. DWP, Young people and work: interim report, 28 May 2026

Nor is it a claim that this morning’s number is worse than it looks. It is 30,000 down on the quarter. But the ONS is unusually direct about how its own series should be read: NEET is a small subset of a household survey sample, estimates for small groups are more volatile, and users are asked to focus on long-term movements rather than short-term changes. On that instruction the fall is noise and the year-on-year rise is the line.

The number published this morning describes twenty-two-year-olds, and every response announced with it starts at twenty-two. The register that would have shown it was being marked when they were thirteen, in a building where somebody knew their name. That is not an accusation. It is the only piece of this a school actually holds.