Working together to improve attendance

Guidance to help schools, academy trusts, governing bodies, and local authorities maintain high levels of school attendance including roles and responsibilities

From September 2022, this will replace all previous guidance on school attendance except for statutory guidance for parental responsibility measures.  The Secretary of State has committed to it becoming statutory when parliamentary time allows (this will be no sooner than September 2023).

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance

Summary of Schools’ Responsibilities

The DfE state that every school should:

• Have a Senior Attendance Champion on the leadership team
• Have a clear school attendance policy published on their website
• Have robust day to day processes for recording, monitoring and following up attendance
• Analyse their data regularly and prioritise families to work with to understand and address the reasons for absence, including any in-school barriers to attendance.
• Work with local partners to remove out of school barriers and act as the lead professional where they are the best placed service
• Work jointly with the local authority on an agreed approach/ plan for every severely absent pupil
• Develop strategies for cohorts of pupils with poorer attendance than their peers (including groups of vulnerability)
• Inform a pupil’s social worker if they have an unexplained absence or leave the school roll
• Work with their LA to formalise support where voluntary help hasn’t been effective, through use of parenting contracts or other forms of legal intervention
• Share data electronically with the department and continue to inform the LA of pupils not attending regularly or being added to or removed from the roll

Data Sharing

The automated attendance data trial through Wonde continues to grow and there will be an expectation that all schools share, no later than September 2023.  The DfE have asked that we encourage schools to sign up.

Currently 60% of Warwickshire schools have signed up to share their daily attendance data, which is very positive.

If your school does not use Wonde, please read the how schools share their daily attendance data guidance.

Improving attendance: good practice for schools and multi-academy trusts

To support the transition to the new ways of working, the DfE is holding a series of webinars.  These webinars are a good resource with schools sharing how they have improved their attendance.

Details on our upcoming webinars and how to register are below:

Modernising school attendance and admission registers and setting national thresholds for legal intervention

Government consultation - Launch date 17 June 2022, respond by 29 July 2022.

The DfE are seeking views on new regulations for keeping school registers and draft thresholds for legal interventions to improve consistency across England.

The consultation can be found through the following link:

School registers and national thresholds for legal intervention - Department for Education - Citizen Space

If you wish to discuss this further, please feel free to contact the Warwickshire Attendance Service:

was@warwickshire.gov.uk