A manifesto against bad information

In 2018/19, 10.86% of pupil enrolments in England’s state-funded schools were persistently absent – missing a tenth or more of their possible sessions. By 2024/25 that figure was 18.14%: around 1.34 million children. In the Department for Education’s weekly attendance series, which runs closer to real time, it went up again last year, from 18.70% to 19.05%.

Overall absence has come down a little from its peak – 6.78% last year against 7.15% the year before – but it is nowhere near where it was. Before the pandemic it was 4.73%.

Whatever we are doing about this is not working.

I want to tell you about a Word document.

Somewhere in England this week, a parent is trying to find out when the October half term starts. They will search the school’s name. They will land on a page called Key Information. They will find a link labelled Term Dates 2026-27 FINAL v3.docx, tap it on a phone, and get either a download they cannot open or a preview that has lost its formatting. If they are luckier they will get a PDF. If they are unluckier they will get a JPEG of a calendar in which yellow means INSET, green means term, pink means holiday, and the key is in the corner in six-point type.

Then they will do the thing we all do, which is guess.

The morning crossword

I have come to think of these documents as puzzles, because that is how they behave. There is a grid. There is a key. There are cryptic conventions you are expected to already know – that “Staff Development Day” means your child is not going in, that “Term 2” is not the same as “Spring Term”, that the dates given are inclusive at one end and not the other. Solve it correctly and you have earned the right to book a holiday. Solve it wrongly and you have committed an offence.

Because that is the part that ought to bother you. Nobody fines you £160 for failing to finish the crossword.

Under section 444 of the Education Act 1996, a parent commits an offence if a child of compulsory school age fails to attend regularly. In 2017 the Supreme Court settled what “regularly” means, in Isle of Wight Council v Platt: it means “in accordance with the rules prescribed by the school”. Not usually. Not mostly. In accordance with the rules – rules which, in a great many cases, are published as an image.

The fine is £80 if you pay within 21 days and £160 if you do not. A second notice inside three years is a flat £160. Past that you are in the magistrates’ court, where the maximum is £1,000, or £2,500 and up to three months in prison under the aggravated offence.

In 2024/25, local authorities in England issued 492,800 penalty notices. 459,300 of them – 93% – were for unauthorised family holidays.

What the fines are actually aimed at

Here is the number that changed my mind while I was writing this.

Unauthorised holiday accounted for 0.48% of possible sessions in 2024/25. About one session in every 207. Around 7% of all absence. Illness alone was 3.22%. Unauthorised “other” was 1.56%.

And term-time holiday is falling. From September 2024 the authorised holiday code was abolished, so 2024/25 is the first year in which every term-time holiday lands in the unauthorised column. Even with that change, total term-time holiday absence dropped, from 0.58% of sessions to 0.48%.

So the enforcement machinery of English school attendance – nearly half a million penalty notices a year – is pointed almost entirely at the smallest and fastest-shrinking part of the problem. Meanwhile the thing it asks parents to get right is published in a format that cannot be read by a search engine, a calendar app, a screen reader, or a translation tool.

This has a name

It is not a new observation, and it is better documented than you might expect. In 2015, Donald Moynihan, Pamela Herd and Hope Harvey named the thing: administrative burden, the “learning, psychological, and compliance costs that citizens experience in their interactions with government”. Their argument is the uncomfortable one. Burden is not an accident of underfunding. It is a choice, and because it is made quietly, it is a way of changing what a policy does without ever changing the policy.

Cass Sunstein calls the same stuff sludge – “excessive or unjustified frictions, such as paperwork burdens, that cost time or money” – and notes that it “can hurt the most vulnerable members of society”. Richard Thaler coined the word in Science in 2018. That is an editorial rather than a study, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but the administrative burden literature behind it is real and it is twenty years deep.

The web has standards for this, too, and they are not aspirational. WCAG 1.4.1 is a Level A criterion, the very floor: “Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information.” 1.4.5, at Level AA, says that where the technology can render real text, real text is what you use rather than a picture of it. A colour-coded calendar published as an image fails both, at the lowest bar there is.

I am not claiming a school breaks the law by publishing a JPEG. I am saying that we have known how to do this properly for twenty years, that it costs nothing, and that we are choosing not to.

Open data is the fix

I don’t think schools are being malicious. I think a business manager with ninety other jobs opens last year’s file, changes the dates, exports it and moves on, and no one has ever told them that the format is the problem.

Nobody is going to fix this centrally. Since 2013, academies and free schools have set their own term dates, and there are a lot of them – 48.2% of schools, 83.9% of secondaries, 60.4% of all pupils. Parliament actually legislated to hand term dates to every maintained school’s governing body in the Deregulation Act 2015. Eleven years later that provision still sits on legislation.gov.uk marked “Prospective”. Never commenced.

There is no national dataset. Not in England, not in any of the four nations.

So I built one. Schooldates holds term dates for 26,151 establishments covering 8.9 million pupils, collected source by source from 580 calendars. Every date carries the URL it was read from and the day it was last checked. Nothing is published unless it survives a set of checks, and where a date has not been found the page says so rather than inventing one. The site and the calendar feeds are free. It is machine-readable, because that is the entire point.

Jascha Dräger, Markus Klein and Edward Sosu followed 7,218 children through the Millennium Cohort Study and concluded that looking at absence in snapshots “underestimates the severity of the detrimental consequences of absences for achievement”. They are right, and the consequences are the reason any of this matters. But you cannot ask a family to protect something you will not tell them the dates of.

Publish the dates as data. Put them in a table a browser can read and a calendar can subscribe to. Say which days are INSET in words as well as in yellow. It is an afternoon’s work and it is free.

Until then we are handing parents a crossword and fining them for the wrong answer.

If you work at a school and your dates are wrong on Schooldates, or missing, send them to me and I will publish them as yours: [email protected].