Attendance Strategy, Monitoring and Training Pack
Needing to improve attendance across your school? This full pack takes the latest information from the DfE's Working Together to Improve School Attendance and provides you with easy-to-digest guidance, editable templates, multiple training PowerPoints and eye-catching attendance posters to give you a full starting package for how to tackle pupil absence and raise attendance levels.
Please note, if you're looking for just a particular aspect from this full pack, we've broken it down into separate bundles too so you can grab the resources that are relevant to your school's needs - see the 'What else is available?' section for more information.
What?
A huge pack containing full guidance, 19 editable temples, 7 separate training PowerPoints and 8 stunning, printable posters to support you in improving attendance in your setting. We've broken the pack down into the following three strands so you can use strategies to improve student attendance from a range of different angles:
- Whole-school attendance improvement strategies: Look at the bigger picture by auditing your current provision for attendance and creating an action plan to address any gaps to boost pupil attendance. Use the attendance strategy document, which contains helpful prompts and ideas for improving attendance, to communicate your vision with all stakeholders. Utilise the attendance letter templates and pre-populate your own school's letters on headed paper or add the text to your management information system (MIS) to save time when informing parents of their child's absence rates. We've also included examples of the questions that Ofsted can ask about attendance, which can be used to evaluate your current attendance policies and practices as well as prepare for an inspection (if you feel the need to). Finally, there's a job role description for the attendance manager / attendance lead / attendance co-ordinator / attendance officer in school - this helps to clarify the responsibilities allocated to the role.
- Monitoring and pupil-focused attendance support: Attendance logs are included so you can track student attendance factors like persistent absence and follow up with support. This includes templates to work with a pupil and their parents/carers to identify their barriers to attendance and push & pull factors so you can uncover ways to improve student attendance and create attendance intervention plans that are bespoke to the child. This is supported by the individual attendance audit and action plan documents in the pack.
- Staff Training on Attendance: Included is a ready to use PowerPoint training session on Working Together to Improve School Attendance which highlights the key parts from the DfE document that are applicable to teachers and support staff. There are also six customisable attendance scenarios, covering bullying and physical & mental health, child criminal exploitation (CCE), finance, sickness-related absence, substance addiction and young carers. Each scenario has a complementary PowerPoint that can be displayed in a training session or INSET, allowing staff to collaborate and discuss how to break down barriers to attendance and support the pupil's individual circumstances.
Additionally, there are eight beautiful and printable posters that you can put on windows or other places that parents access in the school. Alternatively, send them as part of your newsletters or put them on your website to keep communicating the importance of good attendance.
The full attendance pack has been carefully designed to consider different ways to improve pupil attendance together as a whole-school community, giving you a great starting point to plan strategically to support each and every one of your pupils.
Who?Whatever your job title - attendance co-ordinator, attendance officer, attendance lead, attendance manager - if you're the person with a designated responsibility for attendance in your setting, this pack is ideal for you. School business managers (SBMs) , school administrators and school office staff may also find aspects of this pack useful, and of course, headteachers/principals and other senior leaders looking to reduce pupil absence rates can use the pack and delegate different aspects among the SLT.
How long?Start as soon as you download the pack then read through the guidance to begin thinking about the best place to start for your school. We've included suggestions for this throughout so you can quickly find the routes you wish to take.
When?There's no better time to start thinking about improving attendance (or maintaining high attendance) than right now. While you may have key times of the year to monitor attendance, implementing attendance improvement strategies at any time of the year is going to help in the long term.
Why?Now more than ever, pupils are experiencing more and more barriers to attending school regularly. Whether these are down to the cost of living crisis, the after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, rising pupil mental health issues or something else, pupil absence rates are a rightly a concern for many schools. This, combined with dwindling educational welfare officer support in some areas, means that many schools are looking to take swifter action, which is why we've designed this pack to support school leaders.
