Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to support schools to increase the level of pupil attendance.

The Department has a comprehensive attendance strategy to improve school attendance. Guidance has been published setting out how the Department expects schools, trusts and Local Authorities to work together to improve attendance. This can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1099677/Working_together_to_improve_school_attendance.pdf.

The Department’s guidance is clear that schools should develop and maintain a whole school culture that promotes the benefits of high attendance, have a clear school attendance policy and have effective day to day processes in place to follow-up absence. The guidance sets out that schools are expected to rigorously use attendance data to identify patterns of poor attendance, at individual and cohort level, as soon as possible so that all parties can work together to resolve them before they become entrenched. To help schools to do this, the Department has recently launched new functionality which allows mainstream schools that are sharing daily attendance data to compare attendance with other schools within their Local Authority. This can be seen under the ‘compare your attendance tab’ in view your education data, at: https://viewyourdata.education.gov.uk/. The tool will help schools to identify strengths and priorities and signpost to additional guidance and support.

The Department has employed expert attendance advisers who are playing an important role working closely with Local Authorities and a number of multi-academy trusts with higher levels of persistent absence to review their current practice and support them to develop plans to improve. The Department has also recently launched a £2.32 million attendance mentor pilot to deliver intensive one to one support to a group of persistently and severely absent pupils. The pilot will run for three years supporting a total of 1,665 pupils. The findings from this pilot should enable schools, trusts, and Local Authorities to address persistent and severe absence more effectively.

My right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education, has established an alliance of national leaders from education, children’s social care and other relevant services to work together to raise school attendance and reduce persistent absence.

Schools and Local Authorities can also use a range of measures to provide support for and/or sanctions against parents when their child’s irregular attendance in school becomes a problem. These measures are used to reinforce parents’ responsibilities and to support them in improving their child’s attendance at school.