Best Practice

Getting attendance right: Eight things schools can do this term

Attendance Senior leadership Whole-school issues Legislation and guidance
Attendance is everyone’s responsibility according to the recent statutory guidance and it continues to be a core focus for schools this year. Headteacher Josephine Smith provides a practical eight-point ‘to-do’ list for the months ahead
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In his article for SecEd at the beginning of this term, headteacher Neil Renton suggested that getting “your attendance spaghetti ready” was a key leadership priority this autumn and challenged us all as school leaders to ask ourselves: “What do you need to do to start the term with the highest levels of attendance?”

He described a headteacher whose approach to attendance last year was simple – “from the beginning in September, we threw everything at it, like spaghetti at the wall, and hoped it stuck”. The leadership method wasn’t about sophistication, but about “timing, application, and focus from the very start”.

This article aims to unpick some of those sticky strands and offers eight practical suggestions about what “throwing everything at it” might look like in your school this term.

We know that the government sees attendance as a priority and the 94-page Department for Education statutory guidance (DfE, 2022a – although updated in August) and the accompanying toolkit for schools (also updated in August) has been obligatory reading for school leaders during the summer break.

Remember – the guidance is statutory and so all schools will need to have digested the contents.

You will know the figures, but it is worth emphasising that the research around attendance reveals a number of harrowing facts:

  • Very few schools can say that the attendance of their students is back to pre-pandemic levels.
  • Attendance is clearly linked to a student’s attainment at GCSE. DfE data (2022b) evidences that at key stage 4, students not achieving grade 9 to 4 in English and maths had an overall absence rate of 8.8%, compared to 5.2% among those achieving grade 4 and 3.7% of those achieving grade 5 and above.
  • Last year, 58% of year 7 to 11 students who missed school at the start of the year went on to miss at least 10% of sessions across the whole academic year (Beynon, 2023).
  • And for vulnerable students, we know that attendance is an important protective factor.

As with most statutory guidance there are the “must do now” tasks (actions that must be taken to be compliant) and the longer-term strategy (to ensure that best practice is in place, is repeatable, and can become embedded). Taking the “spaghetti approach” will probably mean doing some of those things simultaneously.

Below is the practical to do list we will follow in our school this term, the intention being to make attendance “everyone’s business” as the DfE’s guidance suggests.

 

An autumn term, attendance ‘to-do’ list

1, Complete your attendance (and admissions) registers accurately and report daily

There are three things to do here. First, be aware that there are some new codes for logging reasons for absences in your attendance register.

Your school MIS will be useful here. Ours provides the new definitions for each code at the click of a button at the point of data entry.

Sections 289-411 of the statutory guidance set out clear code definitions as well as identifying whether using specific codes will count as attendance, authorised or unauthorised absence, or whether the code is “not collected for statistical purposes” by the DfE.

Second, you must now share daily student attendance data with the DfE. To ensure this you simply grant permission via Wonde for the data to automatically transfer from your MIS. The DfE’s document Share your daily school attendance data (2022c) offers a guide. Be reassured that the DfE “talks to” 20 different MIS – there is no manual upload or intervention required.

A school is therefore compliant when the school has and continues to have all the required information in its MIS and when Wonde has continued permission to access that information at any time.

Your attendance teams and IT network team will be instrumental in effecting this – the key therefore is ensuring that the information in your MIS is accurate.

Third, Section 43 of the statutory guidance advises on the day-to-day processes school should have in place. Definitions of lateness and when to record a late student as absent from a session are included.

All this will work swimmingly if admissions registers are also accurate. The detail for admissions registers accuracy can be found in Sections 203-281 of the guidance. Your data and/or admissions administration team will need signposting.

 

2, Ensure you have identified a member of your senior leadership as your Attendance Champion

They need to be named in the school attendance policy and will oversee the success of your attendance strategy. They are likely to be the person who enacts the third point above and should have attendance responsibility detailed in their job description. Depending on your school attendance data it may well be that improving school attendance is an area of focus in their appraisal targets for this year.

 

3, Put a meeting in the diary this term with your School Attendance Support Team

Every local authority is expected to have a School Attendance Support Team which provides four core services to all schools (regardless of type) free of charge. They offer communication and advice, “targeting support meetings” (typically termly), multi-disciplinary support for families, and legal intervention.

Ensure you have booked in your targeting support meeting for this term. It will be an opportunity to identity students and cohorts at risk of poor attendance and agree targeted actions and access to services for those students.

 

4, Schedule training for your staff

As with any initiative in school collegues need to have a common language to use when they discuss attendance. Does everyone understand “persistent absence” (missing 10% of sessions or more), “severe absence” (more than 50% of sessions), “at risk of persistent absence” (missing between 5% and 10% of possible sessions)?

What about “authorised and unauthorised absence”, “agreed absence”, “exceptional circumstances”, “late”, “penalty notice”? These are all terms that all staff should be clear about.

They all have precise definitions and only when you share this common language can you be sure that you are talking in a focused and precise way about improving attendance.

Reassure colleagues that their job isn’t to solve absence once and for all, but simply to play their part in creating the culture and expectations of high attendance.

This might be by enacting the school rewards system or taking a good-humoured approach as a form tutor to an inter-form attendance competition. It might be as a head of year regularly monitoring the cohorts and individuals’ attendance patterns using data provided and meeting with parents to understand any obstacles facing those at risk of persistent absence.

 

5, Establish what attendance patterns look like in your school

If you haven’t already put systematic processes in place for identifying individuals and cohorts who fall into the different absence categories, then your MIS is your new best friend – it provides easily downloadable absence data.

As a senior leadership team, agree how regularly you will analyse the data and how you can represent all those numbers in a digestible format that will be useful as you make decisions and report to various stakeholders.

First though, see if you can identify any patterns from last year’s data. Is a particular group of students most likely to have poor attendance in your school? Are there times in the week, term, year when attendance is especially high or low?

In our school, our SEND and Pupil Premium students are the groups we need to do most work with and we have noticed that attendance of a cohort is often poor directly after a residential educational visit.

 

6, Communicate with parents

Start communicating at the start of the year, clarifying for parents what good attendance looks like and how it links to attainment over time. Celebrate high attendance as soon as you have the opportunity.

If attendance declines for a student, communicate swiftly with parents and demonstrate that you want to understand the barriers to good attendance. State your desire to help remove these barriers.

There are templates available for messages to parents, including suggested letters from the DfE (2024), but you are best placed to decide how you reach parents in your school. Newsletters, settling in evenings, parents’ evenings are all forums for setting the culture and nudging families.

 

7, Review your attendance policy

You should review your policy now at the beginning of the year to ensure you are compliant and then again in line with your annual policy review schedule so that you can incorporate any changes to your strategy that you have planned. Clear advice on what to include in your attendance policy can be found in Section 26-30 of the statutory guidance.

 

8, Decide how you will report attendance data to your governing body and other stakeholders

If you get point 5 right above, then you have probably already anticipated this one, but remember that we must appreciate how our governors and relevant stakeholders will seek assurances around attendance with us.

If you want to monitor patterns in attendance a dashboard that can be shared with senior leadership, governors, and trust leaders is often a way of doing this that is time-efficient and easy to digest.

 

Final thoughts

Attendance is a huge issue with many related factors. For example, dealing with the thorny issue of low attendance due to physical or mental ill-health or the many other reasons for severe absence is a topic for an article in itself. So is knowing what to do when all your efforts seem not to have worked.

However, for now I wish you good luck in using this term to get off on the right foot and promote good attendance in your setting.

 

Further information & resources

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