All schools in England to be given AI-generated pupil attendance targets (www.theguardian.com)

The UK government will issue every school in England an AI-generated minimum pupil attendance target this month, using a data-driven model that benchmarks each school against peers in similar circumstances—factoring in deprivation, location and pupils’ needs. Targets will remain private (not published or shared with Ofsted), and schools will be paired with high-performing counterparts serving comparable communities to share attendance-improvement practices. The move is framed as a response to stubborn post-pandemic shortfalls and a recent rise in severe absence (pupils missing >50% of sessions), with the Department for Education noting one in three schools has shown no improvement. The announcement matters to the AI/ML community as a high-profile public-sector deployment of automated benchmarking: it promises scalable, tailored goal-setting and peer-led interventions but raises technical and ethical questions about model fairness, transparency and incentives. Teaching unions warned the policy will add pressure on already overstretched leaders and may not address root causes of absence that are outside schools’ control. For practitioners this underscores the need for rigorous bias audits, explainability, ongoing evaluation of outcomes, and careful design of incentive structures to avoid gaming or penalising schools serving disadvantaged populations.