Best Practice

Encouraging attendance; discouraging absence

Winning the fight against school absence requires a culture of everyone taking responsibility for attendance; it requires us to encourage attendance and, crucially, to discourage absence. Jimmy Watt explains how Audenshaw School is winning this battle
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We have read so much about school attendance over the last 18 months and I don’t think I need to revisit here the current state of the national absence figures that schools, especially secondary schools, are fighting so hard to improve.

A National Crisis. The Covid Legacy. Things will never be the same again. The think-tanks. The change in attitudes towards education and school. Gloom. Doom. Challenge. Challenge.

I lead attendance in an all-boys setting on the outskirts of Manchester. The “forgotten” sleeping satellite district of Tameside.

Some could argue that this adds to the woe. I would argue these are the same challenges that we all face. Socio-economic, deprivation and the all-too-well documented changing views about the importance of school attendance.

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