How to Improve Attendance in UK Primary Schools
Improving attendance in a primary school takes a collective effort. When everyone in the school community understands their role in promoting attendance, the impact can be transformational.
In this blog post, we’ll explore some approaches you can build into your attendance strategy to help you keep children happy, healthy and in school.
Take a Whole School Approach
Improving attendance in a primary school means making attendance everyone’s business. From SLT to admin staff, teachers and teaching partners, everyone has an active role to play in encouraging good attendance and supporting families.
For classroom staff, that might be a pastoral role based on your relationship with the children you work with. For admin staff and SLT, it might also include analysing attendance data and working with families.
What’s clear is that it’s important everyone understands their role in improving attendance and feels supported in their role. This might mean discussing your attendance strategy with all staff during an INSET day. Your attendance strategy will outline your approach to managing attendance, including your intervention plan, role descriptions and escalations.
It’s also a great thing to show Ofsted, as they’ll want to see your attendance strategy – particularly how you improve the attendance of persistent absentees.
If you’d like help planning your whole-school approach or want to run it by an attendance expert, book a free consultation with one of our friendly schools consultants.
Build Strong Relationships With Families
Keeping parents engaged in their children’s school life is critical for them to understand the importance of school and why it’s necessary to attend as much as possible.
It’s vital to build a positive relationship with families and establish trust so that when you need to have difficult conversations around subjects like persistent absence, they’re more likely to accept what you have to say.
Analyse Attendance Data in Detail
An important part of any attendance strategy is to analyse attendance in detail. Where are there patterns of absence? Which children need support? What interventions are working?
Your attendance system should help you easily monitor data at school, year, class, cohort and pupil level, helping you analyse attendance across target groups. This is exactly what Studybugs Attendance does.
From persistent absence to poor punctuality, analysing your data effectively means you can intervene early and prevent problems from escalating. Which brings us to our next point.
Act on Your Data Effectively
Having the right data available is no good if you don’t use it.
Using your data is key to planning and carrying out the right interventions. When you spot an area of concern, dig deeper to find the underlying reason for absence. For example, if a pupil is frequently late, is there a problem with transport to school?
Understanding your data and using it to plan your actions is key to making improvements like reducing persistent absence or improving punctuality.
Studybugs can help you with this by automatically notifying the right staff about attendance concerns, so they can act immediately on the data, eg sending your SENCo a notification when a child with SEND is absent without reason so they can follow up.
Remove Barriers to Attendance
Addressing the underlying reasons for absence is key to improving attendance and reducing persistent absence. That’s no secret, but identifying these obstacles can take some effort.
Schools using Studybugs Attendance can dig deeper into their attendance data, helping them identify barriers so that they can focus their efforts there, saving time and effort and ultimately helping them intervene earlier.
But improving attendance doesn’t end there. Successfully reintegrating children after a period of absence is also critical. Children or their families can feel anxious about returning to school for fear of being told off for their absence. Of course, following an absence or pattern of absences, the last thing you want is for a child to be worried about coming back in.
We heard about a school that created a safe space for students to arrive at school, so families can drop off children without fear of having a confrontational conversation the minute they reach the school gates.
Create an awesome school culture
Securing good attendance doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s related to the quality of your school’s curriculum, ethos, behaviour and inclusivity.
In other words, make school a place children want to be. Think about what you can do to improve pupil wellbeing. And, for that matter, staff wellbeing.
Maybe that’s revamping your breakfast club with a new menu or board games on the tables. Maybe you make it a goal to have the school with the happiest staff. Did you see the viral post about the school that placed pianos around their site for children to play at break times? What a great idea that was!
Whatever you decide to do, have some fun creating an awesome culture for your school.
See How Studybugs Can Help You Improve Attendance
At Studybugs, our goal is to keep children happy, healthy and in school. With bespoke tools that help you act early on attendance data and save time on admin, plus the ongoing support of a dedicated schools consultant, we’re working with primary schools up and down the country to help them manage attendance more effectively. We’d love to help you too.
— Lucas Abbott