The Mancunian Way: £12k bottle of champers, anyone?

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Convincing kids back to school each Autumn is never an easy task, but it’s proved increasingly difficult since the pandemic. And as new figures show, several Greater Manchester boroughs recorded persistent absences from around a quarter of their pupils last year.

We’ll be talking about that in today’s newsletter, as well as a very visible Just Stop Oil protest and the town facing nine months of traffic chaos.

And as it’s Friday, I’ll be guiding you through some of the most exciting new food and drink offerings in the city with the help of our expert writers. Let’s begin.

Tens of thousands of schoolchildren across Greater Manchester were ‘persistently absent’ from school during the 2022/23 school year.

During the academic year, 84,990 pupils of primary and secondary school age across the city-region did not turn up for class. The figure does not include numbers from Tameside or Stockport, whose authorities are yet to respond to a Freedom of Information request.

As Nick Jackson reports, school attendance figures are supplied to the Department for Education on a voluntary basis - which means absence figures can only be estimated.

The number of persistently absent pupils across schools in Greater Manchester’s local authorities was as follows, with the total statutory school-age population in brackets: Bolton 13,906 (56,697); Bury 3,673 (27,500); Manchester 19,912 (82,966); Oldham 10,100 (43,830); Rochdale 8,965 (38,288); Salford 9,153 (36,068); Wigan 11,945 (46,425); Trafford 7,336 (41,046).

A memo sent out by Salford