Overview – Actions for a school to take to improve attendance and reduce persistent absence

Governors and headteacher/principal agree a time frame and lead person (school attendance leader) ensures that the tasks below have been/are being completed.

Section 1: Review of school attendance policy

This will include: school's ethos, registration periods, policy on requests for holidays in term time; reward schemes and so on. Pupils, parents and all staff (not just form tutors) should be encouraged to become involved in this process. The review also needs to cover how the school may get support from the local authority and its partnership.

Section 2: Review of attendance practice

This should include a detailed audit of current practice and systems. The managerial expectations of all school staff (including heads of faculty and non- teaching staff) should be written down; this should include their daily, weekly, half-termly and termly responsibilities. This point also needs to link with the data section below (Section 3). The school needs to have an escalation of interventions as a means of preventing pupils from accruing high levels of absence.

The school senior leadership team needs to have a clear method of monitoring the consistency and compliance of all areas of attendance procedures so that they can take appropriate action when required.

Section 3: Identify how data can be used most effectively to inform actions

In order to avoid being 'data rich' but 'information poor', the senior leadership team needs to determine what data are going to be produced and by whom, when this will happen, who the data are for and what actions staff receiving these data are required to take.

Section 4: Provide whole-staff training

All members of staff need to be aware of how their role impacts on attendance as well as the expectations for them with regard to attendance. To ensure consistency throughout the school, training should also cover issues such as which absence codes to use.

Section 5: Ensure that the school fulfils the minimum requirements to improve attendance by reducing levels of persistent absence

This includes:

• ensuring a strategy is in place to prevent pupils getting to the point where they have persistent absence
• using the persistent absence framework to identify the school’s strengths and areas for development
• developing a system that regularly identifies pupils who have and are at risk of persistent absence
• using a pupil profile assessment for pupils with persistent absence
• developing pastoral support programmes/individual education plans and so on that record the support/challenge offered by the school for pupils who meet the criteria for persistent absence.