Recommendations
Schools should:
- Strengthen planning to strategically improve attendance, including making effective use of data to identify trends and in planning long term approaches to improving pupils’ attendance
- Strengthen their approach to monitoring, evaluating and improving attendance
- Strengthen their work with parents/carers to explain why good attendance is important
- Develop more effective methods to gather the views of pupils who do not attend school regularly
- Ensure that teaching and the curriculum offer engages pupils in learning
Local authorities should:
- Provide schools with regular and effective challenge and support to improve pupils’ attendance and help evaluate the impact of their work
- Ensure that local authority interventions build on work already carried out by schools
- Work with schools to support them to work with parents/carers to understand the importance of good attendance
The Welsh Government should:
- Develop a national campaign to promote the importance of good attendance with parents/carers and pupils
- Consider how pupils living within the three-mile radius who are not eligible for free transport could be better supported to attend school more regularly
- Publish core data sets for attendance twice a year, including regression analysis, residuals for persistent absenteeism and year group attendance to better support schools’ own evaluation processes
- Continue to provide weekly analysis of school level attendance to provide more frequent information and improve the quality of this data
- Consider how funding can be allocated more effectively to support schools to improve attendance
- Consider how reform of the school year might better support pupils to attend school more regularly
- Carry out research to identify the factors impacting on poor attendance and to discover the most effective methods of improving attendance