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).
Local Authority Communication and Advice
As part of our new responsibilities, we will developing robust communication processes to ensure we can work effectively with schools to provide support and advice when required.
This will include providing each school with:
- guidance on how schools, the Attendance Service and other partners should work together
- clarity around what support schools should already have offered and the point at which the local authority will become involved in individual cases
- a named point of contact in the Attendance Service who can support with queries and advice, and with whom Targeting Support Meetings will be held.
- opportunities for all schools (regardless of type) to regularly come together to share effective attendance practice. This is not intended to be resource intensive and can happen in person or online (including through newsletters, webinars, or virtual drop-in sessions).
Attendance Network Drop-In Week
The Warwickshire Attendance Service are running an attendance ‘drop-in’ week in July 2022, aimed at school attendance leads and attendance coordinators. This will be series of informal meetings using Microsoft Teams. The Warwickshire Attendance Service Leadership team will be available to provide updates and to answer your questions in relation to new requirements.
The week will be 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th July 2002 from 3:30pm to 4:30pm. Additional time will be available afterward if required.
Should a member of your school wish to attend and ask questions, please can they email was@warwickshire.gov.uk and include their name, school, position and all the dates they wish to attend. Please can they put as many dates as possible, as we may sort the meetings by school type, depending on the demand. It would be beneficial to have questions in advance with this email but not essential. We will email invitations to the appropriate meetings during week commencing 27th June 2022.
Data Sharing
We are being asked by the DfE to encourage all schools to sign up to data sharing. We have been told that we will be provided with access to the shared data by the end of June 2022 and will then contact those schools not currently sharing to provide support. Further details can be found at the following link:
If you are in the process of changing your MIS or have plans to and have any questions, then please contact us. We will arrange a call back from our ICT team to discuss this in more detail.
DfE Webinars for Schools
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.
Webinar theme
23 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
30 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
Previous Webinars can be found at the following Link:
‘Working together to improve attendance’ can be found at the following link:
‘Improving school attendance: support for schools and local authorities’ can be found at the following link:
If you wish to discuss this further, please feel free to contact the Warwickshire Attendance Service.
was@warwickshire.gov.uk