Educational Attendance and Attainment of Children in Care, 2018 - 2023

Absent from school for 20 days or more in the academic year 2018/19

Student Absence Reports are submitted by schools twice a year to Tusla for those students absent from school for a cumulative total of 20 days or more. Only children over the age of 6 years and children who have not reached the age of 16 years or have not completed 3 years of post-primary education, whichever occurs later, are included in the absence report, as school attendance is mandatory for those pupils.

The Student Absence Reports were recorded for 65,856 pupils for the academic year 2018/2019. Of these 62,237 (or 95%) could be successfully linked to other pseudonymised administrative data sources using Protected Identifier Keys or PIKs (see Background and Methodology for more details on PIKs). This means in principle these records can be matched to children that were in care in January 2023 or who left care since 2018, and who were in the age group where school attendance is mandatory. A total of 61,769 pupils were matched (see Table 3.1), of which 554 pupils were children in care. In order to compare school absence of children in care with all children, the proportion of children with 20 days or more absence among all those aged 10 to 20 in January 2023 was calculated (children aged 10 to 20 in January 2023 were aged 6 to 16 in January 2019, also see Table 2.1 for figures on single year of age).

The data shows that the proportion of children absent from school for 20 days or more were higher for children in care than for all children. Of the children in care that were aged 10 to 20 in January 2023, around 11% were absent from school more than 20 days for the academic year 2018/19, see Figure 3.1 and Table 3.1. The equivalent figure for all children was 7%. As not all schools returned absence reports, these figures may be underestimated[1].

The mean number of days children in care were absent in the school year 2018/19 was 43, while this was 34 days for all children.

Looking at the distribution of days missed by reason, absence was most commonly due to illness or unexplained, see Figure 3.2 and Table 3.2.

Table 3.3 shows factors such as sex, type of care placement and school repetition by school absence for children in care. While male and female children in care have the same proportion of absence for 20 days or more (11%), children who had a foster care placement in January 2023 or when leaving care had lower levels of school absence (9%) compared with children in other care types (19%). Children who were in care 5 years or more had a lower proportion of absentees (6%) than children being on placements less than 5 years (21%). 

Pupils changing school

A total of 550,068 children (or 99% of 554,788) could be matched to a primary school enrolment in the academic year 2021/22, and 4% of those (or 21,018 children, see Table 3.4 and Figure 3.3) were recorded as having entered a mainstream primary school from another national school in the State, and hence changed school compared to the previous academic year. By contrast, 9% or 274 of children in care had changed primary school.

Using all available annual primary enrolment records available to the CSO from the 2015/2016 academic year and onwards, of the children in care enrolled at primary school, 30% were enrolled at more than one primary national school in Ireland, while this figure was 13% for all children. Furthermore, of the children in care enrolled at post primary school from 2012/13 to 2021/22, 19% were enrolled at more than one national school, while this was 6% for all children, see Figure 3.4 and Table 3.5.

The higher proportion of children in care that changed schools compared to the comparison group is also observed for different age groups (see Table 3.5).

[1] Note that school response rates for individual absence reporting for 2018/19 were 76% for primary schools and 73% for post-primary schools, see Tusla School Attendance and Absence Report, 2018/19 for details.