The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: end of 2026 calendar year Tackling school absence is central to the government’s mission to remove barriers to opportunity. Departmental analysis shows a link between absence and distance from school, but this is a relatively modest factor compared with wider drivers of absence. The department has developed real-time attendance data tools that enable early intervention including AI-powered reports comparing schools’ attendance with statistically similar schools and sharing pupils’ year 6 attendance data with secondary schools. Since September 2024, a new absence code has captured issues with local authority-arranged transport. In the 2024-25 academic year, only 0.011% of all school sessions were missed because transport normally provided by a local authority or school was unavailable – representing only 0.15% of total sessions missed. The department continues to explore how best to understand the relationship between attendance and transport and is working with local authorities to consider existing data and undertake qualitative insight-gathering to further build our understanding. However, the extensive piloting and complex experimental evaluation needed to quantify more precisely the relationship between home-to-school transport and attendance would likely be disproportionate, given what is already known about that relationship. There is limited robust evidence on how transport affects post-16 attendance or the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). The new home-to-school transport data collection, alongside wider work on the drivers of NEET, should strengthen understanding. Existing local authority duties and the bursary system should ensure young people are not prevented from participating in education due to transport needs.