“In their letter withdrawing their pledge, Glenmoor and Winton schools flagged research by the children’s commissioner that showed that only one in 20 children who are persistently absent achieve five good GCSEs.”

As someone who grew up on a shitty council estate in a socio-economically deprived area of the country, I’m a little exasperated by the backwards understanding that measures like this show. The majority of people who die from old age have grey hair, but this doesn’t mean that hair dye will help reduce deaths from aging.

I sympathise with the school, because they almost certainly have some understanding that it’s a big blob of complex things that underlie and link attendance to attainment, but figuring out what to do about that is a whole other problem. Certainly though, I think this level of attendance requirements is silly