READERS of the Evening Press might have received a misleading picture of pupil attendance in York schools from the article and editorial (February 6).

The article revisited the school attendance figure published by the Government last December. The trigger for this was a speech by the Secretary of State for Education and Skills about behaviour and attendance in which York Local Education Authority (LEA) was given a special mention for the quality of provision in the Student Support Centre for pupils educated other than at school.

This was widely reported elsewhere though not, unfortunately, in the Evening Press which, instead, opted for a very partial account of the performance of the LEA in the league tables.

Let me set the record straight. The main figure used by the Government to measure attendance is the percentage of pupil absence as recorded in school registers.

As an LEA we are particularly proud of the performance of primary schools when judged by this measure. Only nine other LEAs in the country (out of 150) do better, and over the last 12 months, York is the 28th most improved authority.

This is a real success story and reflects very well on schools across the city.

Performance in secondary schools is less good, but York still performs above the national average and is showing an improvement on the equivalent figure from two years ago.

These figures cover absence of all kinds. The public debate tends also to focus on "unauthorised absence". This is a much less reliable statistic because it depends upon the way in which schools complete their records.

In both primary and secondary schools York does better than the national average for unauthorised absence, though, as with the figure for overall absence, primary schools in the LEA perform better than secondary schools.

Patrick Scott,

Director of education and leisure,

City of York Council,

Mill House, York.

Updated: 10:39 Tuesday, February 08, 2005