Many with additional needs - those who need extra support beyond the classroom - may have SEN too.
But when researchers from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NfER) tried to unpick data on additional needs from statistics covering schools and communities, they had to think creatively.
"There's nothing to flag up the fact a particular pupil has additional needs, so we studied available data and used exclusion rates and persistent absence as indicators," explains Simon Rutt, head of statistics at NfER and data lead for C4EO.
The team found a far higher proportion of pupils on free school meals are persistent absentees.
Some findings were unexpected. More children with English as a first language are regularly absent from school compared to pupils with English as an additional language (EAL).
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