The phrase "authorised absence" is correct and usable in written English.
It is typically used in contexts such as employment or education to refer to a period of time when someone is officially allowed to be away from their duties or responsibilities.
Example: "The employee was granted an authorised absence to attend a family emergency."
Alternatives: "approved leave" or "official absence".
Apart from illness, the biggest reason for authorised absence is a family holiday.
I call these backdoor exclusions, because they are recorded as an authorised absence".
The authorised absence rate has fallen to 5.07% of half days from 5.2% in the autumn term of 2009.
The BBC's James Landale has written a good blog saying her fate could depend on a single piece of paper, an "application for authorised absence".
Shahnawaz and Sofiya Patel had put in a request to their two sons' primary school for an authorised absence to make the trip last December when the children's grandfather was undergoing surgery.
The total authorised absence rate fell to its lowest level, with children in all schools missing 5.28% of sessions in 2007-08, down from 5.59% in 2006-07, possibly reflecting a harder line by headteachers.
In September 2013 the DfE introduced rules that constricted the power of headteachers to grant authorised absences for family holidays, restricting authorised leave to "extraordinary" circumstances, such as funerals.
As the proportion of authorised absences has fallen, so the percentage of unauthorised holiday absences has risen, from 3.2% in 2012-13 to 4.4% in 2014-15.
It's also reported that even though authorised absences have dropped since the introduction of stricter rules in England in 2013, there's been a rise in unauthorised absences and parent fines.
The number of "authorised absences" — which are generally due to illness – fell by 15% in the wake of his 2004 Feed Me Better campaign, brought into the nation's sitting rooms via the Channel 4 series Jamie's School Dinners.
In total, 32.7m pupil school days were missed owing to authorised absences in the autumn term of 2012 and the spring term of 2013, with the total falling to 28.6m pupil days in 2014-15.
