Is attendance everyone’s job?

I have long been a proponent of attendance being ‘everyone’s job’. I have carefully constructed strategies to improve whole school attendance involving layers of threads, skilfully weaving to ensure that no-one slips through the web.

I have created endless ways for every single member of staff to make attendance their personal mission: resources for form tutors to share with their tutees involving students unpicking and understanding the maths behind attendance; assemblies for Heads of Year to relentlessly pursue; given phrases/questions for teaching colleagues to use when they see a student in their lesson who has been absent for a few days; and of course, tightly micromanaged crib sheets and inevitably colour-coded spreadsheets for pastoral colleagues.

The bottom line? Attendance improved. And not just here and there, but in every single key group of students, by substantial amounts. Victory?

No. Truthfully, with so many strategies so tightly interwoven, it was impossible to measure what exactly had had the required positive impact on our attendance figures. I didn’t know whether my, and consequently, my teaching colleague’s efforts had truly worked. Did utilizing my already extremely busy teaching colleagues really impact on the attendance of our students?

Recently, the inestimable Kat Howard pointed out that using teachers to ‘drive engagement’ of pupils’ remote learning is not their job. Their core business must be teaching and learning – particularly when now more than ever teachers are having to adapt their well learned experiences to a completely new medium. This caused me to reflect – what truly was the impact of putting yet more onus onto already busy teachers on students’ attendance? And whatever the result, was I right to expect teaching and learning experts to focus on anything else?

In the current lockdown amidst school closures (although we are not closed), ‘engagement’ has become synonymous with ‘attendance’. The impetus on ensuring students are ‘engaging’ with home learning is understandably an educational obsession at the moment, with publicly alarming but factually dubious stories about the ‘cost’ of keeping students at home. Whilst the government scuttles to address the certainty of the digital divide by distributing more and more laptops, educationalists are adapting, adjusting, proving time and time again their flexibility and speed at providing learning in ever changing formats. But how much can we as teachers impact on ‘engagement’ or attendance, virtually?

The most recent EPI report looking at school attendance over Autumn/Winter Term 2020 reveals that, shockingly (!), areas in the UK with higher rates of cases saw more absences than areas with a lower number of cases, with the North-East and Yorkshire and the Humber particularly badly affected. Interestingly, but again, not particularly surprisingly, areas of extreme deprivation were more likely to be affected by poor attendance due to COVID. So now, not only do these students have a greater likelihood of not having access to the devices and internet needed to access remote learning, but they’re also more likely to have missed learning during the previous term, which could link to the work they’re being set now.

So what factors do have impact on attendance? Looking at stats from ‘normal’ years, 50% of student absence in 2018-19 was listed as being down to ‘illness’, with 5% listed as term time holidays in Secondary (this rises to 12% in Primary). Boys are more likely to be absent than girls – but aside from gender, the real factors that affect attendance appear to be ethnicity (those from a traveller/gypsy/roma background are most likely to be absent, followed by mixed white and black Caribbean ethnicities), socio-economic background (the absence rates of students listed as Pupil-Premium Ever 6 are 2.5% higher than those who are not) , SEND need and/or disability, or those with what is classed as double or triple ‘disadvantage’ – further analysis of this information can be found in a previous blog post of mine here.

What can teaching colleagues do about the above?

What can teaching colleagues do about the above? Teaching colleagues absolutely contribute towards good attendance by simply doing what they are experts in: making school/lessons good places to be by ensuring the learning in their lessons is worthwhile and long lasting; building positive relationships with all their students; and maintaining consistency and comfort through ensuring high standards of all. These qualities are mentioned in the DfE guidance for schools and local authorities on improving school attendance.

Other school colleagues may wish to look at a previous blog post on mine on strategies for improving attendance, but to return to my original question: Is attendance everyone’s job?

Yes, but to a degree. Absolutely, school leaders should be looking at careful strategies to target the families who most need support, but perhaps we should be wary of the overburdening of our teaching colleagues – teaching and learning experts in their own right.

As always I’d love your thoughts – please comment below, or join the conversation on twitter @MrsLFlower.