Socioeconomic Disparities in School Absenteeism after the First Wave of COVID-19 School Closures in Scotland

School attendance is crucial for children’s educational attainment (e.g., Ansari & Pianta, 2019), particularly for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (Ready, 2010). During the Covid-19 school closures, socioeconomic inequalities in engagement with home learning have exacerbated (Andrew et al., 2020; Kuhfeld et al., 2020; The DELVE Initiative, 2020), which likely led to an increase in disparities in educational achievement (Engzell, Frey & Verhagen, 2020). To reduce further learning loss and mitigate socioeconomic gaps in achievement and wellbeing for all children, governments around the world reopened schools immediately after the first wave of Covid-19 pandemic (Scottish Government, 2020a&b; DFE, 2020; Bryant, Dorn, Hall, & Panier, 2020; Barton & Parekh, 2020).