Attendance is the metric that schools, local authorities, and Ofsted use to determine whether a child is coping. If a child attends, they are in the eyes of the system participating. The box is ticked.
But attendance is a binary measure. It tells us whether a child was physically present. It cannot tell us whether they were emotionally available to learn. It cannot measure recovery burden.
For many children with autism, ADHD, anxiety, or sensory processing differences, school attendance is an act of endurance rather than participation. They survive the day. They do not thrive in it.
When we rely on attendance as a proxy for wellbeing, we miss the children who are quietly deteriorating. Their internal experience is one of escalating exhaustion a slow collapse that only becomes visible when it reaches crisis.
This is why longitudinal observation matters. A single attendance snapshot says almost nothing. But tracking the trajectory reveals what the data cannot.
An EHCP assessment that relies primarily on attendance data is an assessment that has already missed the point. The question is not "does this child attend?" but "at what cost?"