Working together to improve school attendance

Over the past few months, the PRU, Inclusion and Attendance Service (PIAS) team have been developing strategic plans to help implement and embed the requirements of the Working together to improve school attendance guidance published by the Department for Education in May 2022, which is due to become statutory no earlier than September 2023.

The guidance shines a spotlight on ‘support first’ and recognises that attendance is ‘everyone’s business,’ with a key feature being local authorities, schools and partners working collaboratively to ensure children and young people access regular education by ‘unblocking barriers to attendance’.

The guidance is for:

• All school and academy trust staff, headteachers, governors, academy trustees and alternative provision providers.
• Local authority attendance staff, early help lead practitioners, social workers and virtual school heads.
• Statutory safeguarding (including police and integrated care boards) and other local partners.
• Parents and carers.

The summary of changes include:

• Clarity of expectations - all schools, trusts and local authorities will all have clearly defined statutory roles set out in the DfE’s Summary table of responsibilities for school attendance
• Earlier intervention - all schools will have legal responsibilities to proactively improve attendance for the first time (beyond existing requirements to record accurately) underpinned by sharing of attendance data in a timely way.
• Support first - all pupils, parents and carers, no matter where they live in the country, will have clear expectations from their school, be regularly informed about their child’s attendance and have access to early intervention and support first before any legal action if it becomes problematic.
• Targeted whole family support - attendance teams in the local authority will work in tandem with early help to provide a whole-family response with a single assessment, plan, and lead practitioner (usually the school).
• Independent schools - data will be collected for the first time and will receive the same support from the local authority.

The guidance expects local authorities to provide a core offer to all schools free of charge. PIAS will have a key role in the following areas of focus:

• Communication and advice – provide termly opportunities for groups of schools to come together at district level to discuss general attendance matters, local resources and challenges, and share good practice. In addition, PIAS will provide guidance and training to early help workers, social workers and other partners to ensure addressing absence is a key priority, along with providing each school with a named point of contact.
• Targeting Support Meetings (TSMs) – hold termly (three times per year) conversations with schools, using their attendance data to identify pupils and cohorts with or at risk of poor attendance (severely or persistently absent) and agree targeted actions and access to services for those pupils, and as a last resort legal action.
• Multi-disciplinary support for schools – provide access to a range of integrated children’s services such as early help or social care to work intensively with families to provide practical whole-family support where needed to tackle the causes of absenteeism and unblock the barriers to regular attendance. This also includes advising and occasionally acting as lead professional in the single family plan where the local authority team is most appropriate to do so, however, usually this will be the school.
• Legal intervention – where all voluntary support has been exhausted and proved unsuccessful, consideration must be given to the full range of interventions available such as parenting contracts, education supervision orders, fixed penalty notices and attendance prosecution to determine which is most likely to change parental behaviour and improve the young person’s attendance.

The guidance also refers to the important role of virtual schools in monitoring and improving the attendance of children with a social worker. The Virtual School Kent Advisory Team will continue to work closely with schools, PIAS and social work teams to build on existing work and drive the focus on promoting school attendance for this cohort of young people.

For schools, the expectation is that a culture which promotes the benefits of attendance is developed and maintained, and strong relationships with families are forged to understand barriers to attendance and work together to remove them. All schools should accurately complete admission and attendance registers and have effective day to day processes in place to follow up absence. In regularly monitoring and analysing attendance and absence data, schools should identify pupils or cohorts that require support with their attendance and put effective strategies in place. When absence is at risk of becoming persistent or severe, schools should share information and work collaboratively with other schools in the area, local authority and other partners. In order to inform all stakeholders of attendance procedures, schools must have a clear attendance policy which all leaders, staff, pupils and parents understand.

To support schools, an ‘attendance guidance checklist’ is available for school leaders to assess their journey in making the required changes to their practices to meet the requirements of the DfE guidance. Also available and in line with advice from the Department for Education, an ‘attendance policy checklist’ will enable school leaders to not only meet the expectations of the guidance regarding their attendance policy, but also bespoke the policy for their individual school. Both these resources can be found on PIAS Resources for Schools page. Over the coming months, operational guidance will be published to schools that will further enable them to meet the expectations of the guidance and access the support as and when required from the local authority.

The PIAS policies have promoted a ‘support first’ methodology for many years with attendance prosecution always being pursued as a very last resort and only when all avenues of support have been tried and exhausted to improve a young person’s attendance. The PIAS Digital Front Door (DFD) on Kelsi has been refined which includes a pathway to invite PIAS Officers to a formal attendance meeting (facilitated by a senior member of school staff) as a final effort to unblock the barriers to a pupil’s regular attendance before exploring the use of a range of legal interventions.

The Working together to improve school attendance guidance should be read alongside the statutory DfE guidance documents on parental responsibility measures, children missing education, supporting pupils with medical conditions at school, suspensions and exclusions, alternative provision and safeguarding.

There are a number of useful webinars that may assist you in your planning and these include:

• Ofsted webinar - Securing good attendance and tackling persistent absence
• DfE webinar - School Attendance Guidance Training Webinar - Analysing absence and attendance data 
• DfE webinar - School Attendance Guidance Training Webinar - Setting an effective school attendance policy

If you would like more information, please contact the PIAS link officer for your school, details can be found on the PIAS Officer Contacts page.