Scarborough secondary schools have been found to have the lowest attendance rates in North Yorkshire amid calls to address the situation to prevent ‘very significant’ future problems.

Louise Wallace, North Yorkshire’s director of public health, has revealed that secondary schools in Scarborough have the lowest attendance rates in the county.

On Friday, November 29, councillors on the Scarborough and Whitby Area Committee were updated on the “huge amount of work being done by the council on school attendance”.

Public health officials said that they were specifically focussing on the links between mental health and levels of absence.

Speaking at the meeting Coun David Jeffels called for a working party of councillors and officers to be set up to examine the issue and told colleagues he feared that if the students were not attending school “it could lead to them becoming involved in anti-social behaviour and possibly drug-taking and crime”.

Coun Jeffels, a former governor and past chairman of a secondary school, added: “It is vital that we talk to the students themselves to  seek their views because, in the long term, the cost of tackling any problems resulting from non-attendance could be very significant on the public purse.”

Dr Gill Kelly, a member of the public health team, said she recognised the concerns, as did NYC, and highlighted that an Attendance Alliance had been set up “within the council across multiple directorates, including health, to look at attendance in schools across the whole of the county, not just Scarborough”.

She added: “We have some really interesting projects planned, including a deep dive into the links between mental health support or engagement and the impact that has on school attendance and levels of absence.

“If we find that children who are not able to attend school full-time are actually engaging with mental health services, we then have to start asking what else is it and what more can we do within that school environment to make young people feel that school is where they want to be.”

Committee members were reminded that issues with school attendance “do not only affect North Yorkshire or Scarborough, this is a pattern that has been seen post-pandemic in every single area of England and it is something that concerns every educator”.

Coun Jeffels added: “No one agency or organisation can tackle the  problem in isolation and in-depth study involving these young people, teachers, parents, education experts and councillors could help find solutions which would benefit the students, enhance the reputation of the town’s schools, and benefit local authority budgets.”