An initial look at new provincial absence data

A new dataset on student absences in BC public schools has recently been released by BCEdAccess, based on a provincial FOI request. It brings together absence rates, reasons, and enrolment across the 2022/23 and 2023/24 school years, broken down by inclusive education designation.

We plan to examine this data in more detail. For now, we want to note a few immediate patterns that stand out on a first review.

The most consistent finding is straightforward: students with inclusive education designations are absent at higher rates than their peers without designations, and this holds across districts and across both years.

1 million more missed school days than non-disabled students

When applied across the provincial population, the gap translates into a substantial loss of instructional time. Using the Ministry’s own population-by-designation data and absence rates, disabled students lost approximately 4.75 million school days across the two years. If those same students had been absent at the rate of non-designated peers, that figure would be closer to 3.61 million days — a difference of roughly 1.14 million additional days of school missed.

Measure	Value	Notes
Total disabled student-years	156,898	Sum of all designations
School days per year	187	Standard instructional days
Non-designated absence rate	12.28%	Baseline comparator
Expected days lost (at non-designated rate)	3,607,175	156,898 × 0.1228 × 187
Actual days lost (disabled students)	4,745,700	Scaled using designation-specific rates
Excess days lost	1,138,525	Actual minus expected

Sources: Population Data, Absence Data

Put another way, this is not just a difference in percentage points. It represents a meaningful reduction in access to education at scale.

Consistent pattern of ‘unspecified’ absence reason

A second pattern is more difficult to interpret, but equally important. A large proportion of absences are recorded as “unspecified.” This limits the system’s ability to understand why students are not in school and raises questions about how absence is being tracked and responded to.

This brings into question the very reason for keeping statistics. It is my understanding that government captures such population data so that they can address concerns that the data raises. Despite the ministry having this data for many years it doesn’t appear that any analysis or Follow-up actions have been taken.

Terry Fox Secondary: a look at one school

Getting down to the school level is difficult because the province masks many designation counts where the number of students is small, typically under 10. That makes it hard to examine patterns within individual schools.

One way around this is to look at larger schools and more common designation categories, where the data is less likely to be suppressed. Using Terry Fox Secondary in Coquitlam as an example, we looked more closely at two groups:

• Intensive behaviour/mental health (H): absence rates at Terry Fox Secondary were more than double the provincial median for that designation (approximately 44% compared to ~20%).
• Autism spectrum disorder (G): absence rates shifted from below the provincial median (14.7%) to well above it (22%) over the two years.

Across the two years, each designation includes roughly 26 to 37 students, meaning the results are not driven by very small numbers. Across just these two designations and two years, this corresponds to approximately 7,500 school days lost at a single school.

In per-student terms:

• Students in the H designation missed an average of 78 days in 2022/23 and 82 days in 2023/24 (out of 187 school days)
• Students in the G designation missed 27 days in 2022/23 and 41 days in 2023/24

Missing more than 80 school days in a year represents a substantial loss of access to education. Even 41 days amounts to more than two months of missed school time.

This example is not presented as representative of every school. Rather, it illustrates what can become visible when school-level data is available: the broader provincial pattern — higher absence among students with designations — can, in some cases, appear in concentrated and highly visible ways within individual schools.

Next steps

We will be returning to this data with a comprehensive analysis, including how these patterns vary by school context, designation category, and region, and what they may indicate about how access to education is being experienced in practice.