Understanding the relationship between attendance, wellbeing and sense of belonging
03 June 2026
Improving school attendance rates is currently a top priority for schools and the Government. Despite considerable efforts from schools and the Government to get pupils back to school, absence rates in England remain above pre-pandemic levels.
The problem is especially apparent in secondary schools where the average absence rate was 8.4 per cent in the 2024/2025 academic year compared with 5.5 per cent in 2018/2019.
Declining school attendance has coincided with reported declines in pupil wellbeing. This has led to widespread discussion about whether declining pupil wellbeing could be driving increases in school absence, but this relationship is not well understood.
In addition, pupils’ sense of school belonging has recently become a key focus of policy efforts to improved attendance. However, evidence linking improve school belonging with pupil outcomes, including attendance, is limited.
This study aimed to understand the potential relationships between pupil wellbeing, sense of school belonging and school absences to help inform solutions for tackling the attendance crisis.
We conducted regression analysis on linked data from the 2022 Programme of International Assessment (PISA) and the National Pupil Database (NPD) to explore the relationships between:
- life satisfaction and school absence rates
- sense of school belonging and school absence rates
for 15-year-old pupils in England.
Our results offer insights into how life satisfaction and sense of school belonging relate to school attendance, but our analysis is associational rather than causal so we cannot determine if better life satisfaction or school belonging led to better attendance or vice-versa.
For example, higher life satisfaction may lead to better school attendance, but better school attendance could also lead to higher life satisfaction.
Key Findings
- Pupils’ life satisfaction ratings were significantly related to school absence, and this relationship was stronger among pupils with higher levels of school absence. However, improving life satisfaction along is unlikely to solve the attendance crisis.
- Life satisfaction is a much stronger predictor of school absence for females than for males, suggesting that the drivers of school absence may be different for females and males.
- Sense of school belonging also predicts school absence, but this effect was not sustained after controlling for life satisfaction. This highlights that improving sense of school belonging is unlikely to fully solve the attendance challenges in schools.