Education Endowment Foundation:Supporting school attendance

Supporting school attendance

Monitor the impact of approaches

Monitoring the effectiveness of an approach will help you understand whether it is being delivered with high quality and success, or whether (and how) it might need to be changed to improve processes and outcomes. To support effective monitoring, you should think about the outcomes you want to achieve and develop an appropriate set of measures. Data collection processes need to fit with school routines and be sustainable for staff to use in a busy working environment. 

Key guidance report

1. Consider how an approach will be monitored, before you implement it.

‘Have we clearly identified the outcomes? We often make changes without fully considering what we want to see at the end. The pressure to make immediate improvements results in too many priorities not being sufficiently thought through. If we want our actions to make a difference, we should probably focus a little more on evaluation: identifying what success will look like […].

How do we adapt and refine our strategy? Even the best designed development plans require adaptation in practice. Being clear about the intended outcomes in the short, medium and long term will help to identify where things have gone wrong and where amendments are needed, such as more follow up training or providing increased time to sustain change.’

- Phil Stock, Director of Greenshaw Research School, The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium

Questions to support effective monitoring

  • What information will we gather to monitor and evaluate the impact of approaches?
  • Does the recording and monitoring of information add to anyone’s workload? If so, is this workload reasonable within their role(s)? Is it possible to remove something else to make the time for this new activity?
  • What will be the signals that the approach is being implemented as we intend?
  • What will be the signals that the approach is having the intended impact on pupil attendance?
  • How will we know if problems are emerging with our approach?
  • Is any training or follow-on supported needed for staff beyond initial communication and training?
  • When and how will we respond to implementation data to tailor and improve our approach?

Further reading and sharing practice