This report focuses on the strategies and actions that secondary schools were employing in order to improve pupils’ attendance. It also considers the support provided by local authorities. The report identifies strengths and areas for improvement in practice and the barriers school leaders identified to pupils attending school and therefore improving attendance. It also includes cameos and case studies of effective practice.
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