Pupil absence in schools
Staffordshire · the 2024/25 school year
In the 2024/25 school year, pupils at state-funded primary, secondary and special schools in Staffordshire missed 6.2% of their possible sessions — 2,439,838 sessions missed out of 39,592,238.
Read from DfE’s Pupil absence in schools in England through the Explore Education Statistics API, in the vintage we archived on 12 August 2026.
6.2%
of sessions missed
By pupils at state-funded primary, secondary and special schools in Staffordshire, the 2024/25 school year
That is the 132nd-highest overall absence rate of the 153 local authorities that reported the year.
The overall absence rate in 2023/24 was 6.8%, so it fell 0.6 percentage points.
The overall absence rate across England was 6.8%.
17,400 of the 110,394 pupil enrolments in Staffordshire — 15.8% — missed 10% or more of their possible sessions that year, which is the threshold DfE calls persistent absence. An enrolment is a place at a school, so a child who changed school during the 2024/25 school year is counted twice.
2,002 enrolments — 1.8% — missed half or more of their possible sessions, which DfE calls severe absence.
A session is half a school day — a morning or an afternoon — so a pupil in school all year has about 380 of them. Overall absence counts every session missed, authorised and unauthorised together; most authorised absence is illness.
Overall absence rate among local authorities, the 2024/25 school year
- … 121 authorities between
- out of 153 local authorities that reported the year
The share of possible sessions missed, which is the publisher’s own figure. Every local authority is in one ranking here: unlike a count, a share of an authority’s own sessions asks the same question of a county and a London borough. An authority that did not report the year is absent from the ranking rather than counted as nil.
Every school year we hold
| School year | Overall absence | Sessions missed | Possible sessions | Persistent absence | Severe absence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018/19 | 4.6% | 1,759,587 | 38,306,069 | 10.2% | 0.8% |
| 2020/21 | 4.2% | 1,633,794 | 38,597,762 | 10.8% | 0.9% |
| 2021/22 | 7.6% | 2,941,585 | 38,893,105 | 22.4% | 1.3% |
| 2022/23 | 6.9% | 2,668,066 | 38,705,428 | 19.3% | 1.7% |
| 2023/24 | 6.8% | 2,710,278 | 39,799,667 | 18.5% | 2.0% |
| 2024/25 | 6.2% | 2,439,838 | 39,592,238 | 15.8% | 1.8% |
2019/20 is missing from this table. DfE published no full-year absence statistics on this basis for the year schools closed, so it is a gap in the publisher’s record rather than a year in which nothing was counted. Any comparison on this page names the school year it actually used.
Each row is a whole school year, September to July, for state-funded primary, secondary and special schools. Persistent absence is an enrolment that missed 10% or more of its possible sessions; severe absence is one that missed half or more. Both are shares of enrolments, not of pupils.