Although school psychologists are involved in dealing with the problem of pupil absenteeism at both the individual child and whole school level, one of the possible reasons for their involvement, namely the belief that significant absence from school has an effect on attainments, is actually founded on weak evidence. The literature review presented in this article revealed that, in order to determine the effect of absence on attainments, no satisfactory study had hither to been conducted in which attainments had been measured before and after a period of absence. However, the results of longitudinal research partially conducted by the present author, reported in this article, do show that absence from school has a significant effect on primary school attainments. In particular, it was found that an absence of half a year between the ages of 7 and 11yearsofage resulted in a reduction of 0.7 of a year and 1 year in reading and mathematics test scores respectively. The article ends with a consideration of the kind of research which still needs to be conducted in order to provide school psychologists with the information they need to deal successfully with pupil absenteeism problems.
Previous research has shown that summer compared to autumn or spring born children have been found to do less well educationally, to be more likely to have their abilities underestimated and to be considered to have behaviour problems, but not to differ in terms of school attendance. That last result is refuted by the results of this study which is based on more than 5000 pupils in their last year of primary education and which reveals that: (a) after controlling for gender and size of family, the summer born have the poorest and the autumn born the highest attendance rates; and (b) in the case of pupils with attendance rates of 80 per cent or less, more of them are summer born and fewer, autumn born.
A literature search identified only 12 articles which had examined the relative effect of either attendance or absence on primary/ elementary school children's literacy and numeracy. However, with respect to the relative effect of both attendance and absence, no consistent picture emerged from the articles. Furthermore, for each of the articles, the conclusion about the relative effect was based on visual inspection of the relevant statistic. The second problem was overcome in the study presented in this article by using the British Ability Scales Word Reading and Basic Arithmetic scales to assess the literacy and numeracy of eleven-year-old Poor and Better Attenders. Significantly more of the former than the latter were found to have an arithmetic score significantly below their reading score. The article ends with a consideration of the implications of the study for the primary school teacher and of COVID-19 for the study's findings.
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