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).
This week the DfE started a series of LA training webinars. The following changes were highlighted:
The Big Changes
1.Clarity of expectation: schools, trusts and local authorities will all have clearly defined statutory roles for the first time, set out in a clear table of responsibilities
2.Earlier intervention: Schools will have legal responsibilities to proactively improve attendance for the first time (beyond existing requirements to record accurately) underpinned by timelier sharing of attendance data
3.Support first: All pupils and parents no matter where they live in the country will have clear expectations from their school, be informed about their child’s attendance and have access to early intervention and support first before any legal action if it becomes problematic
4.Targeted whole family support: Attendance teams in LAs will work in tandem with early help to provide a whole-family response with a single assessment, plan and lead practitioner
5.Independent schools: data will be collected for the first time, and will receive the same support from LAs (which currently happens in some LAs but not others)
Data Sharing
The DfE attendance data trial continues and we are being asked to encourage all schools to sign up. Once the trial ends, there will be a requirement to share data using this system. 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 to discuss this in more detail from our ICT team.
Webinars for Schools
In order to support the transition to the new ways of working, the DfE is holding a series of webinars.
Webinar theme
09 June 2022 (16:00-16:45)
16 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
23 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
30 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
TBC
- Effective governance to appropriately challenge leaders on attendance.
Previous Webinars can be found at the following Link:
‘Working together to improve attendance 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