The subject is school truancy.
The Independent kicked off with a challenging headline: "Absentee children could fill 1,000 schools".
The Sun was keen to put things in easily graspable terms too, saying: "There are enough absent youngsters every day to fill 816 primary and 252 secondary schools." That both papers used these same, very precise, figures is not surprising. They came from the audit office report.
A casual reader could miss the important detail that the total number of absent children, 450,000, who could theoretically fill these non-existent schools, includes not just truants but children who were ill, at the dentist, on term-time holiday, caring for relatives or on other officially sanctioned absences. Just 50,000 were truanting.
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