Low-attendance college students aren’t ‘hidden NEETs’

The recent Children’s Commissioner report on ‘hidden NEETs’ highlighted the very real need for a national definition and record of post-16 attendance. However, it also made the claim that attendance recording in colleges is poor and needs to improve, that more than half of college students are ‘persistently absent’ and characterised young people with low college attendance as ‘hidden NEETs’.

This perspective has not gone down well with the FE sector. While the report’s recommendations are welcome, notably the call for free bus travel for all 16 to 18-year-olds, what was off-target was the implication that colleges are not consistently capturing or using attendance data.

In over 20 years of senior leadership in three different colleges, I must have interviewed and enrolled thousands of students and delivered hundreds of induction talks and assemblies of various kinds. In every single one of those talks, briefings and conversations I emphasised the importance of attendance and punctuality as part of our expectation of all students, set out clearly in the learning agreement that students sign. None of this was unusual. I was simply emphasising what all my colleagues were also saying across the college and across the sector.