Schools struggling with their attendance rates can make a difference by focusing efforts on those pupils who nearly always attend, the Department for Education’s attendance tsar has told leaders.
At a Department for Education conference on transforming secondary attendance, school leaders were told that a lot of school absence is down to children who miss the occasional day.
In the average secondary school, the DfE said, “approaching half of absence can be attributed to pupils who miss 15 per cent or less of their sessions”.
Attendance in schools
Much of the focus in the attendance crisis has been on pupils who are severely absent - those missing 50 per cent or more of their lessons.
Rob Tarn, the DfE’s national attendance ambassador and CEO of Northern Education Trust, said it was “really easy” for heads to say they cannot drive up attendance because “I’ve got this group of kids that I am finding it really hard to reach”.
“But that is not true,” he added. “That is not why your overall attendance figure is struggling at 88, 89, 90 or 91 per cent. It’s because the vast majority of kids who could come to school all the time - because they nearly come to school all the time - don’t.”
He said shifting the attendance rates of these pupils would “allow your pastoral teams to get under what are the barriers stopping our most vulnerable families sending the most vulnerable children to our schools”.
Pupils who miss 15 per cent or less of their sessions were also highlighted by schools minister Catherine McKinnell, who delivered a closing speech at the event.
She said one of the key things she wanted heads to take from the conference was the importance of early intervention.
Importance of early intervention
“The 1 million children missing between 5 and 15 per cent of school - that is where early intervention can really make a difference,” the minister said.
She also talked about the importance of a “support-first approach” and increasing students’ sense of belonging in school.
Tes published an analysis this week on the research backing the government’s focus on belonging as the answer to behaviour and attendance challenges.
“Belonging is really fundamental for a child not only to achieve but also to thrive,” Ms McKinnell said at today’s event.
The conference was one of a series of events focused on attendance that are being held across the regions in England.
During his speech, Mr Tarn also warned that attendance was an issue before the Covid pandemic.
“Attendance in too many schools in the North East of England was unacceptably low before Covid. So when we hear a lot about returning attendance to pre-pandemic levels in some of our schools in the North East, that means attendance being in the upper 80s [per cent],” he said.
“And that is not OK because the links between poor attendance and outcomes, life chances and societal issues are too well documented for us to give up on it.”
Attendance hubs
Northern Education Trust’s approach to improving attendance by bringing schools with similar contexts to work together has led to the creation of a programme of attendance hubs.
Tes asked DfE officials at today’s conference whether these hubs would continue or be expanded and how they would work alongside the department’s new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams, which are also focusing on attendance.
Simon Blake, deputy director of the DfE’s attendance policy teams, said: “School-to-school support is a key part of the RISE teams and we remain committed to building communities of practice on attendance.”
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