Children skipped nearly 4.2 million days of school during the autumn term last year as the truancy rate rose, Government figures showed today.

Almost 60,000 primary and secondary school pupils bunked off classes without permission on a typical day during autumn 2007, the statistics suggested.

A hard core of 44,000 "persistent absentees" missed one day a week, with another 305,000 pupils judged to be at risk of joining this problem group.

The Government blamed winter bugs for keeping thousands of children at home as overall absence - including sickness and holidays - rose dramatically among primary school pupils.

Children's minister Kevin Brennan stressed that fewer secondary school pupils were missing classes than in 2006.

"The reduction of overall absence and persistent absenteeism in secondary schools shows that our policies are working," he said.

"The emerging evidence shows the rise in absence in primary schools last autumn was largely due to illness.

"I encourage all schools to continue to focus on minimising pupil absence, to eliminate unjustified absences and to get persistent absentees back into lessons."

The Government acknowledged that the hard core of pupils who are persistently off school represented "the major challenge we must tackle".

The figures, released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, showed:

:: 43,920 "persistent absentees" missed at least one day of primary and secondary school every week during the autumn term through truancy, sickness and other reasons.

:: Another 305,000 pupils were missing nearly one in 10 lessons and "may become persistent absentees", the Government suggested.

:: Primary and secondary pupils missed 4.17 million school days without their teachers' permission.

:: The proportion of all school sessions that were missed through "unauthorised absence", which includes truancy, rose to 0.94%, up from 0.90% in autumn 2006.

An estimated 59,000 pupils were skipping class without permission on any typical day, according to an analysis of the Government's figures.

Mr Brennan said the rise in unauthorised absence was a "logical consequence" of schools taking a tougher approach.

"It is no surprise when the unauthorised absence figure goes up because schools are taking a tougher stance on weak excuses they may once have authorised," he said.

But teachers said they need more freedom to make lessons interesting for pupils who skip school because they are bored.

Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The Government needs to draw the obvious lessons from the latest truancy figures.

"There are no magic solutions to tackling core truancy.

"Schools do their best to deal with persistent truancy but they cannot, on their own, address deep-rooted social problems which lead to truancy.

"There is no substitute for working with individual families."

Schools need "the freedom to make the curriculum as flexible as possible in order to engage school refusers", she said.

The figures showed that overall absence - including sickness - rose sharply in primary schools, with children missing 5.36% of school sessions during the autumn term 2007. This was up from 4.75% in 2006.

There was a slight fall of 0.01 percentage points in overall absence in secondary schools.

Liberal Democrat Shadow Children, Schools and Families Secretary, David Laws said: “There are massive inequalities in our education system between schools in deprived and more affluent areas.

"We simply cannot accept a situation where over half of schools in the most deprived areas are failing to get an overwhelming majority of their pupils up to a good exam standard. 

“These figures reinforce the case for introducing a Pupil Premium which would target extra money on young people from more deprived backgrounds, bringing their level of education funding up to levels in the private sector.”