While recent years saw a series of dramatic headlines around the digital transformation, the most significant change in education this week is not another piece of technology or an unexpected U-turn in the education policy. Rather, it is the appearance of a new phenomenon dubbed “attendance drift”.
According to the statistics presented in the UNESCO 2026 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, released late March, a certain shift destabilizing education across the UK and internationally is taking place. While total school dropouts may not be the story here, the key factor is the growing problem of fragmented attendance, which means students regularly skip classes, skipping either some days at the beginning or the end of the week. For instance, the students skip classes on a Friday or Tuesday, creating a kind of “stutter” for the cumulative effect of lessons.
How Attendance Drift Challenges Traditional Models of Education
In response to these trends, according to school leaders’ comments this week, the approach to delivering classes needs to undergo a certain change. Given that teachers can no longer expect that all their students have attended the “foundational” class from two days prior, the traditional model of education is put to a challenge.
Real-time justification: Instead of grading final outputs, teachers ask students to verbally justify why they performed as they did.
Modular design of lessons: As a result of fragmented attendance, each class is now designed as a module to enable even students who failed to attend the Monday lesson to follow subsequent lessons.
The “oracy” movement: The UK schools put special emphasis on oracy – the skill of explaining your thoughts orally – because it enables students to demonstrate that they know the topic beyond just writing an assignment on it.
These changes coincide with the final debates held on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill moving to the last stage in the House of Lords. The main aim of the bill is to make it possible to introduce mandatory registers for children not attending schools and empower local authorities with tools necessary to address this issue.
On the contrary, educators note that such drift is cultural and not legal. With increasing flexibility of people’s lives today, students and parents treat school week more “negotiably” than ever before.As a result, in 2026, schools cannot rely only on students’ achievement in terms of performance anymore, as the key factor to be considered here is students’ regular attendance.
Key update: At the same time, the Department for Education announced that all schools must revise their existing written policies related to relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) and publish them by the beginning of the following academic year, emphasizing personal safety and whole-school wellbeing.