Understanding the use of Attendance & Family Liaison Officers as a school level strategy to improve attendance – School Choices

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) partnered with the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) to commission a series of research projects to identify effective approaches for supporting pupils at high risk of absenteeism and/​or exclusion and reduce their risk of involvement in violence. This study was funded through that programme.

Schools use a wide range of strategies to monitor and manage attendance. The EEF’s Rapid Evidence Assessment on attendance interventions highlighted gaps in the evidence on commonly used approaches in England, including the use of attendance and family liaison officers. This study was commissioned to help address that gap.

The researchers investigated the impact of attendance and family liaison officers on pupil attendance by comparing changes in attendance over time between schools that employed these roles and those that have never employed them. The analysis covered both the pre-COVID period (2013/14 to 2018/19) and the post-COVID period (2020/21 to 2022/23).

On average, employing an AFLO did not in itself lead to a meaningful improvement in persistent absencePupils missing 10% or more of school sessions.. However, there was significant variation in how schools define these roles and what they expect of them. There was also some evidence that schools that had not employed an AFLO were carrying out similar tasks (particularly those of a more administrative nature) through other staff. Taken together, the findings suggest that improving attendance is less about specific roles or structures, and more about the quality of relationships, culture, and day-to-day practice across the school.

In the pre-COVID period, persistent absencePupils missing 10% or more of school sessions. fell slightly in the year schools introduced these roles, rose the following year, and then fell again after two years. However, all changes were very small – around 0.1 percentage points – which, in a school of 1,000 pupils, is equivalent to the number of persistently absentPupils missing 10% or more of school sessions. pupils increasing or reducing by one. In the post-COVID period, introducing these roles was associated with a small increase in persistent absencePupils missing 10% or more of school sessions.. Overall, these findings have a moderate to high security rating.

There was some evidence that attendance and family liaison officers may have been more effective for pupils eligible for free school meals. Persistent absencePupils missing 10% or more of school sessions. for this group fell slightly in the pre-COVID period and more noticeably in the post-COVID period. There may also be evidence of larger reductions in persistent absencePupils missing 10% or more of school sessions. among pupils of Black and Asian ethnicity in the pre-COVID period. However, post-COVID findings for ethnic subgroups were small and inconclusive. These subgroup findings are also less secure due to smaller sample sizes than for the overall pupil population.

Reflecting the finding above that the nature of the activity carried out may be more important in improving attendance than specific roles or structures, schools should not make decisions about whether to employ an attendance and family liaison officer on the basis of this evidence alone. However, where schools do employ attendance and family liaison officers, they should prioritise executive and strategic tasks, such as undertaking home visits, addressing barriers to attendance and designing policy and strategies to manage attendance. Schools should aim to ensure the role is well-supported by senior leadership, that staff have access to quality attendance data systems, and that they are well integrated with the wider team.

• The pre-COVID analysis used data on over 500,000 pupils across 621 schools, 198 of which that had introduced attendance and family liaison officers, and 423 that had not.
• The post-COVID analysis tracked 150,300 pupils across 298 schools, 51 of which that had introduced attendance and family liaison officers, and 247 that had not.
• Across the cohorts used in the pre-COVID analysis, between 20.2 and 21.7% of pupils were eligible for FSM.
• For the post-COVID analysis, 14.6% of pupils were eligible for FSM.

• Schools that were interviewed emphasised that the effectiveness of attendance and family liaison officers depended on senior leadership support, quality attendance data systems, and integration with other staff.
• Schools without attendance and family liaison officers indicated that their typical administrative tasks were still carried out by other staff members (teachers, form tutors, pastoral staff, reception staff, and/​or senior leaders), including attendance monitoring, calling pupils, and informal pastoral support. However, these schools felt that more intensive targeted support (such as home visits, meetings with families, developing action plans, and delivering activities to address barriers) was more difficult to replicate for other staff given time and resource constraints and other responsibilities.
• Attendance and family liaison officers were perceived by schools to have the greatest impact when providing tailored support to pupils, such as one-to-one engagement, and addressing individual barriers to attending school.