Home > Attendance
Research Name : Childhood development, household circumstances and school attendance trajectories.
Researchers : Dr Anna Leyland
Research Year : 2025
Supporters : Understanding Society
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CHILD-REN are pleased to announce a new research project supported by an Understanding Society Fellowship awarded to Dr Anna Leyland. The research will be one of the first to use the Understanding Society cohort data linked to the education data collected by the Department for Education in England.
Understanding Society is the largest longitudinal household panel study of its kind, running since 2009 and collecting data from over 40,000 households. Learn more about Understanding Society on their website.
Poor school attendance has received increased attention since the COVID-19 pandemic, when school absence rates increased; however, school attendance has presented a consistent issue over time and place. Poor school attendance is linked to broad disadvantages in childhood and across adulthood, including school exclusion, worse educational attainment, higher risk of contact with the criminal justice system and unemployment. Many influences on school attendance arise from within the family, with school (dis)engagement and challenging school behaviour associated with child maltreatment, poor parent health, parental unemployment, worse attitudes to education, low socioeconomic circumstances, parental separation and distant family relationships.
This new research project will use measures of child development available in the Pregnancy and Early Childhood Collection of Understanding Society, including the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire and the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scale.
The project will answer several important questions:
The project will use advanced methods to address these research questions. Firstly, latent growth models will be used to assess attendance trajectories. This will identify the
typical patterns of attendance within the data for each child and this will establish whether a child had stable, improving or worsening attendance over time. Secondly, factor analysis will be used to establish robust measures of child development at each time point. This step allows several measures of child development to be combined for each developmental stage. Lastly, the mediating pathways for household circumstances and child development on attendance trajectory will be assessed using structural equation models. This final stage will help to investigate whether attendance patterns are explained by a combination of early life development and household circumstances, and whether good school attendance can benefit later child development by offsetting a) a challenging household environment in early life and b) worse preschool development.
This final stage of analysis will take account of other potential factors that may impact on a child’s school attendance including attitudes towards school, perceived community safety, and school climate.
More details of the project plan can be found in this slide-pack:
Tip: If you are having trouble reading, you can view the slideshow in full screen, or you can download the pdf here.
Watch this space for several outputs coming from this project. We are planning to share the code used to analyse the data on CHILD-REN’s GitHub pages.
We will also be sharing a recorded presentation of the project findings later in 2025, along with a written summary of the project.
