Attendance - Tackling the crisis: supporting students to value coming to school

This was a really thought-provoking session at our summer conference July 2024, from one of our colleagues from Ambition Institute with whom we work closely as a Delivery Partner for ECT and NPQ programmes through the Five Counties Teaching School Hubs Alliance that we lead for our region.  

Steve Farndon’s presentation really underlines how securing good Attendance is everyone’s problem to solve. Attendance is a serious problem for us in the CLF and for every school in the South West and nationally – it is a persistent and stubborn problem that is not going away and despite all the attention we are dedicating to increasing attendance in our trust and as a sector, the stark figures are that 20% of pupils in this country are persistently missing school. 

Steve Farndon started his session setting out three linked difficulties that education staff voice is reporting, the first two impacting on the third which is student attendance: 

1. staff are struggling with student behaviour, from low-level disruption of learning to more extreme behaviours. This also appears to be contributing to the challenges around recruitment and retention that we are facing. 

2. there are also significant issues around student mental health. Demand for external support and worries about how students are coping is something on the minds of a lot of leaders. 

3. these first two factors contribute to declines in student attendance – which dropped after COVID and has still not recovered. 

Steve Farndon’s conference session went on to consider to depth different forms of motivation and the implications for student engagement and possible links to desire to attend. Whilst the slides and notes cannot possibly replicate or cover the insight and knowledge that Steve shared nor the discussion that was stimulated, the content is sufficient to nudge our continued thinking on this difficult problem – that we all need to find ways to make school attendance more compelling for all of our learners, through the High Expectations we convey in our teaching, through our welcoming and support/concern for our pupils well-being inside and outside school, and through the significant impact we have as positive adults in young peoples’ lives who encourage, nurture and remove barriers.