In this back-to-school series, we are looking at what we should understand when we talk about access to education. As covered in the 2026 GEM Report, access is about much more than enrolment (or school entry, which we covered in the first blog in this series). Unfortunately, not all children complete their education. But children do not drop out from one day to the next.
Dropout is a process rather than a discrete event. Children typically pass through phases of irregular attendance and partial disengagement before exiting the system permanently, as household constraints, community challenges and school practices interact over time. This blog calls for attention to be paid, therefore, to addressing structural barriers that relate to attendance, transition and retention.
How is absenteeism measured?
In education statistics, the terms enrolment and attendance are used to describe whether a child is in school as recorded in administrative data (enrolment) or survey data (attendance). However, the term ‘attendance’ is a little misleading, as it does not refer to the more common usage, which for most people is whether students are actually attending school on a day-to-day basis. There are no comparable global statistics capturing absenteeism, despite the fact that it is a critical precursor of subsequent early school leaving.
When children attend school regularly, it boosts their engagement and raises the likelihood that they will progress through and ultimately complete their education. Conversely, absenteeism weakens ties to school and often marks the first step in a child’s trajectory toward dropout. Despite the fact that absenteeism is a critical precursor of subsequent early school leaving, however, there are no comparable global statistics capturing absenteeism.
Information on absenteeism can be gleaned from a range of sources, such as school registers, unannounced school visits, and self-reported attendance from students or caregivers. One review of 27 studies in low- and middle-income countries identified seven distinct approaches to measuring absenteeism that used different data sources, recall periods and definitions, which make comparisons particularly hard.
School register data can sometimes generate results similar to spot-checks, but discrepancies are frequent and context dependent. In any case, school attendance register information is mostly used for school management purposes rather than to be aggregated at the national level. Self-reported attendance, particularly by caregivers, tends to systematically understate absenteeism.
Few studies report absolute levels of absenteeism, even when there are unannounced visits. Where they do, reported rates vary widely. In low- and middle-income countries, studies report absenteeism levels ranging from less than 10% to 30%, depending on age group, location and definition of presence. For example, studies in Ethiopia, India and Pakistan based on spot-checks showed markedly different absenteeism levels despite similar data collection approaches.
In richer countries, standardized learning achievement surveys ask students in the background questionnaire to report whether they had skipped school, skipped classes or arrived late. While it is difficult to convert these responses to any absenteeism measure that is easy to interpret (e.g. percentage of days of school lost in a year), they still indicate that absenteeism is an important issue and that there are considerable differences between countries. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), for instance, asks whether students had skipped at least an entire school day in the two weeks before they took part in the assessment. These will shortly be updated. However, in the latest PISA round, in Italy, Romania and Saudi Arabia, 7 in 10 students reported they had skipped at least one school day and between 13% and 16% had skipped at least three days in the previous two weeks.
The reasons children may disengage from education are multiple. Some students miss school because they need to work or face transport difficulties, household responsibilities or other economic constraints. Others disengage because they find school irrelevant, unwelcoming or insufficiently supportive. These factors can reinforce one another: intermittent absence weakens students’ ties to school, makes it harder to keep up academically and raises the risk that temporary absence will eventually become permanent exclusion.
“We have some parents who will come to the class and say they want to have their child come home to help them with some of the chores or take the animals to the fields. When this happens, we are obliged to let the child go. After all, they are their parents.” Madame Sarr, a teacher in Senegal.
There is no global answer to the question this blog asks. But monitoring absenteeism is important, regardless of how nascent the measurements may be, because it helps schools identify students whose education is beginning to unravel before temporary absence becomes permanent dropout.
An early warning only works if it prompts action, however. While comparable measurements may take time, the 2026 GEM Report argues for more awareness of the need to use available system level data to feed into policy design and make sure that a missed day does not become a lost education.
