The Good Childhood Report 2026

https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/resources-and-research/resources-and-publications/good-childhood-report-2026

The Children’s Society’s Good Childhood Report 2026 should make uncomfortable reading for anyone involved in education policy. School is the area of life that children and young people are most likely to say they are unhappy with, yet our national response to falling attendance has increasingly focused on compliance, escalation and enforcement.

Of course children need to be in school. Attendance matters enormously, and persistent absence damages learning, relationships and future opportunity. I have spent years arguing that schools must intervene early and consistently when attendance begins to fall. But there is a danger that we become so focused on the percentage that we stop asking what sits behind it.

If a young person is anxious, isolated, struggling with SEND, being bullied, overwhelmed by the curriculum, dealing with difficulties at home or simply feels that they do not belong, another warning letter to their parents is unlikely to transform their relationship with school. The Children’s Society reports that 10% of children and young people have low wellbeing, and the report makes a strong connection between wellbeing, belonging, relationships and access to trusted adults.

For me, that goes to the heart of the attendance debate. Persistent absence is not always simply a behaviour to be challenged. Sometimes it is communication. A child who repeatedly does not attend may be telling us something about their experience of school long before they have the confidence or language to explain it themselves.

There is also something hopeful in the report. A significant majority of young people say they would feel comfortable talking to a teacher or tutor. That matters because it reminds us that schools may be part of the difficulty for some children, but the adults within them can also be a very significant part of the solution.

Perhaps the question should therefore be less about how we get a child back into school and more about what needs to change so that they feel able to come back tomorrow. That is a subtle but important difference. One starts with compliance; the other starts with understanding.

Government can set expectations, create thresholds, introduce fines and tighten processes, but it cannot legislate for belonging. Schools create that through relationships, consistency, curriculum, pastoral care, inclusion and whether a young person genuinely feels known and valued.

I increasingly think that this is the missing piece in too much of the national attendance strategy. We will not solve persistent absence simply by becoming better at pursuing absence. We have to become better at understanding why some children find attendance so difficult in the first place.

Attendance is the outcome of many things. Belonging is one of the most important.

That is why we need to design for presence.