How to Improve Attendance in UK Secondary Schools
In a secondary school, improving attendance isn’t just about tracking absences – it’s about making attendance a whole-school priority. With the right tools, schools can make attendance everyone’s business, turning data into action, reducing barriers for students, and creating a positive, inclusive environment that students want to be part of.
So stick with us while we outline some strategies to improve attendance in UK secondary schools.
Take a Whole School Approach
Improving attendance in a secondary school means making attendance everyone’s business. It’s not just the remit of your attendance officers; from SLT to form tutors, everyone has an important role in securing good attendance.
Setting a framework for your approach to attendance is a great way to ensure staff feel confident fulfilling their roles in securing good attendance. This would include your intervention plan, role descriptions and escalations so that everyone is clear about how you intend to improve attendance as a school. It’s also a great thing to show Ofsted, as they’ll want to see your attendance strategy – particularly how you work to reduce persistent absence.
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
Secondary schools that promote good attendance tend to have clear messages about their expectations and communicate these expectations directly and plainly with students and parents. However, you’ll struggle to engage with students and their families if you don’t have good relationships with them.
The foundations for good communication with families are trust and honesty. It’s important 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 students need support? What interventions are working?
Your attendance system should help you easily monitor data at school, year, form, 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 absent on a certain day, is there a lesson they’re nervous about attending?
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 student 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 students after a period of absence is also critical. Students 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 student to be worried about coming back in.
We heard about a school that created a safe space for students to arrive at school, so students can arrive after an absence or habitual poor punctuality without worrying about being told off the moment they step through the door.
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 students 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 all 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.
Give Students a Sense of Purpose
Part of creating an awesome school culture is about giving students a reason to want to be in school. Giving students a sense of purpose is a great way to improve engagement with school by helping students feel empowered and responsible.
That could be getting them involved in the school play, encouraging them to take part in school sport or starting a new lunchtime club. When students feel engaged and accountable to others, it gives them a tangible reason to come to 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, plus the ongoing support of a dedicated schools consultant, we’re working with secondary schools up and down the country to help them manage attendance more effectively. We’d love to help you too.
— Lucas Abbott