Monitoring attendance has always been important to school leaders, but over the past 20 years or so it has become a growing priority.
This is for two main reasons. One is that the government is increasingly paying attention to the effects of non-attendance on pupil achievement and school performance. The other is that SLTs can now rely on sophisticated software tools to give them up-to-date attendance data.
One school leader I spoke to was able to tell me from memory, without hesitation, that her aim was to maintain attendance at over 96.5 per cent, and that the latest figure was 97.4 per cent, the highest for some years.
Other schools, perhaps in more challenging circumstances, will be running at a lower figure, but the aim always seems to be to stay as far above 90 per cent as possible.
The computer age
The pre-technology paper registers familiar to many from their own school days didn’t tell the whole story about absence. The way to get at the detail, as leading technology firms realised, was to feed the raw registration information into a database, which could then be interrogated to reveal patterns of absence (or presence) among individuals, classes and subjects.
Microsoft partner Capita’s SIMS Attendance application rapidly became the tool of choice for this kind of analysis. These days it is common for teachers to mark attendance straight on to computers or handheld devices linked to the central application.
As users will know, this bare-bones description omits a great deal of detail, not least the facility to let parents know by text immediately if a child fails to turn up or disappears halfway through the day. Behaviour incidents are also logged by SIMS and form part of reporting to parents.
Today’s SIMS, constantly updated and now operating increasingly from Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform, is a sophisticated, user-friendly tool.
Over to the leadership
In the days before the leadership team could access detailed attendance data straight from their desktops, it was largely the job of class teachers and form tutors to chase up absence notes and enquire after children with poor attendance records.
Now, however, leaders have this data at their fingertips - and the responsibility to ensure that attendance is monitored and followed up. A list of the duties this entails might read like this:
- Ensure that the data is accurately recorded at classroom level. If overworked teachers make mistakes in marking online registers, the data is compromised. At worst, parents have been mistakenly informed by an automatic text that their child has not turned up to school, with obvious consequences.
- Make sure that no child is off the radar. Ideally, every absence should be followed up the same day.
- Don’t let a target figure for individual students - say 90 per cent attendance - become the default norm. There have been cases where students, once coaxed over the 90 per cent threshold, then relax and make full use of what seems like “permission” to have one day off in 10.
- Delegate the detail to someone who reports continuously to leadership. In a big school this is often a well-staffed school attendance office. The person in charge, who need not be a teacher, will monitor attendance data for patterns and be a key source of information for the SLT. If spikes of absence coincide with particular lessons or teachers, leadership needs to know and consider what is to be done.
- Identify “hidden” persistent absentees. They are not always obvious. A child (perhaps deliberately) might have half a day off a week, spread throughout the timetable. In a 40-week year this adds up to 20 days of absence that may go unnoticed.
- A whole-school crackdown on poor attendance, with exhortations in assembly and the handing out of certificates or badges for those doing well, has its place. Arguably, though, time is better spent closely identifying who stays away, when and why and with whom. Appropriate staff can counsel individuals and bring in parents. Real issues may be uncovered which can then be proactively managed, perhaps with the help of outside agencies.
- Use the technology to Identify and tackle persistent absentees. These are children who miss 15 per cent or more of school time, and are at risk of becoming alienated from school altogether. Although they are grouped under a single label, each has their own reasons for absenteeism. There may not be enough money at home to keep the child appropriately dressed or equipped, for example. The problems faced by young carers can also often reveal themselves in attendance (and behaviour) incidents. Sometimes a child stays away for reasons that they cannot or will not articulate. School leaders need to know that each case is being looked at carefully. It is also important to deal sensitively with the parents.
Measuring attendance has no effect on its own. Raising a headline attendance figure by a couple of percentage points is difficult and takes vigilance and effort from the top down.
The devil is, as always, in the detail. If a hundred children stay away from a school, it will be for at least 150 reasons - because most will have more than one. The challenge for leadership is to try, with the help of analytical software, to get to the heart of the matter in each individual case - and to remember that the answer may lie as much in the classroom as with the child.
Gerald Haigh is an education writer and author of 15 books on educational management issues, and was a teacher for 28 years
