Supporting school attendance

1. Build a holistic understanding of pupils and families, and diagnose specific needs

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to improving attendance. Knowing and understanding your pupils, their families, their influences, and their specific challenges can help you diagnose some of the underlying causes of absence and more clearly define the problem. It can also help to understand individual barriers to attendance and learning and help choose effective targeted approaches.

1. Explore the issue by going beyond headline data

Building a clear understanding of the precise problem to which you’re trying to find a solution is a key aspect of effective implementation:

In attendance terms, the headline data doesn’t give us enough information to suggest a solution: we need to dig deeper into the individual and contextual factors affecting pupil attendance. Greater knowledge and understanding of the specific barriers to attendance can help you to identify potentially effective approaches that are targeted to the needs of your pupils.

For more on how to explore the problem, you might be interested in reading p.22 – 27 of A School’s Guide to Implementation.

2. Build strong relationships to understand pupil context

Understanding the context of pupils will inform decisions about which strategies are most appropriate and suited to needs within your school and community. Establishing strong relationships and communication channels between teachers and pupils, and school and home, can support this by making it easier for relevant information to be sought and shared within a framework of trust.

Our guidance on improving behaviour details how these teacher-pupil and school-home relationships underpin a contextual knowledge of pupils. For example, awareness of changes in personal circumstances may help schools to mitigate potential negative impact before that impact becomes extreme, by increasing positive influences and interactions or by putting in place interventions such as counselling.

Similarly, awareness of pupils’ social connections or isolation may help schools to encourage positive influences, for example through promoting specific extra-curricular activities or the use of a buddy system to break into friendship groups. Being in an informed position where staff can be aware of negative influences starting or continuing to affect a pupil’s life is key to building understanding and to helping schools to identify relevant and potentially effective approaches to attendance.

3. Build a holistic understanding of the learning needs of pupils with SEN

Our guidance on supporting pupils with SEN in mainstream schools includes information on building a holistic understanding of the learning needs of pupils. Being aware of their individual learning needs within the classroom, and ways these needs can be supported through high quality teaching, may support the attendance of some of these pupils who may be avoiding school – or particular lessons – due to how they feel about their learning and themselves as learners within lessons.