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).
Attendance Network Week
The Warwickshire Attendance Service are running an attendance week in July 2022, aimed at school attendance leads and attendance coordinators. This will be 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 afterwards 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.
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 main proposals relate to the following:
- All registers should be kept electronically
- Local authorities should have access and be able to take extracts from the admission register and attendance register of all schools to enable them to carry out their statutory functions
- Schools should make a ‘sickness return’ to inform their local authority when the authority should arrange alternative education for one of their pupils
- The current Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 should be changed in relation to the reasons a child can be removed from the admissions register. This includes additional requirements where a pupil has a EHCP, CPP or CiNP.
- Recording in the attendance register should be simplified
- Proposed thresholds relating to the issuing of penalty notices for a national code of conduct
The consultation can be found through the following link:
School registers and national thresholds for legal intervention - Department for Education - Citizen Space
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.
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.
Webinar theme
30 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
TBC
- Effective governance which supports stronger attendance
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