School attendance Scotland: Major study finds missing school is as bad for health as smoking and drinking

International report published amid growing concern over Scotland’s high absence rate

Not going to school is as bad for your health as smoking and drinking every day, a major international study has found.

Scientists estimated that every year of education cuts mortality by 2 per cent, with 18 years reducing the risk of death by 34 per cent.

The findings have emerged amid growing concern at low attendance rates in schools across Scotland and the UK since pupils were sent home during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, with a generation of “ghost children” feared to be missing out on education.

A teacher and students in a classroom. Picture: Ben Birchall/PA Wire

One of the new report’s authors told The Scotsman the team’s “breakthrough” findings showed how important it was to get pupils back to schools. Education has long been linked to better jobs, incomes, and access to healthcare, but the extent of the health benefits had not been measured.

The study, published in The Lancet public health journal, showed those who completed six years of primary school had a lower risk of death by an average of 13 per cent. After secondary school, the risk of dying was cut by nearly 25 per cent.

The researchers also compared the effects of education to other risk factors such as eating a healthy diet, smoking, and drinking too much alcohol, and they found the health outcome to be similar.

Not going to school at all was shown to be as bad for a person as drinking five or more alcoholic drinks per day or smoking ten cigarettes a day for ten years.

The report, which looked at data from 59 countries published in more than 600 articles, also found no significant difference in the effects of education between rich countries and poor countries.

Last year, a study by the Reform Scotland think-tank found that in both 2022/23 and 2021/22, a total of 12 per cent of all Scottish pupils – or about 80,000 youngsters in total – had an attendance rate of under 80 per cent – meaning they were missing at least one day per week on average. This compared to about 7 per cent before the pandemic.

It was also recently reported more than 600 pupils in Scotland had a zero attendance rate last year.

Terje Andreas Eikemo, co-author of the report and head of Centre for Global Health Inequalities Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), told The Scotsman the findings were particularly important to consider in the wake of the pandemic.

"Education serves as a fundamental global determinant of health, and the world was making tremendous progress towards securing universal primary education before the pandemic,” he said.

"Hence, the resulting learning loss from lower attendance, and for some children, particularly girls in the Global South, even no attendance, is a major impediment to achieving this objective."

He added: “The magnitude of the study is almost beyond comprehension, as it is a re-analysis of all published studies in this area with no language restriction.

“It really shows that we should do anything in our power to keep schools open during pandemics, both because of the learning loss, but also because many are not returning to school at all. We need to get them back.”