The Department for Education is offering a £5 million contract to recruit and train mentors to support pupils who are persistently absent, under a scheme mooted in last month’s levelling up White Paper.
In the policy paper, the government announced the creation of 55 Education Investment Areas (EIAs) - 95 per cent of which are outside of London or the South East - which will benefit from access to extra help from central government.
It said this help could include “support from the network of school hubs, new pilot programmes to improve attendance and new mainstream free schools”.
The DfE has now said that mentoring to improve attendance has been suggested as a “potential solution” to persistent absence, and that it is looking for a contractor to train mentors who will provide one-to-one support with identified pupils or their families to “overcome barriers” to attendance.
Cutting persistent pupil absence in schools
In a government-published contract notice, the DfE said the planned support offer would start in one identified priority EIA from this September and aim to support 500 to 1,000 pupils, with the option to scale up to multiple areas nationally and support larger volumes of pupils in later years.
It said the successful supplier would be “expected to provide trained practitioners to hold one-to-one conversations with identified pupils and families with an aim to improving attendance”.
The DfE said the estimated value of the contract would be £5 million.
The contract notice comes as newly published data shows that the number of pupils persistently absent from school has doubled during the Covid crisis.
And new DfE data released this week shows that more than one-fifth of sessions (21 per cent) - either a morning or an afternoon of lessons - were missed by pupils not attending due to Covid-related reasons last year.
