Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to increase collaborative working at local authority level to improve school attendance.

The statutory ‘working together to improve school attendance’ guidance sets out that schools, trusts and local authorities should work together to tackle absence. The guidance makes clear that local authorities are expected to work with the child’s parents and school to support them to return to regular and consistent education.

Local authorities are expected to build strong and collaborative relationships across a range of services and partners that can help pupils and families with specific attendance barriers. These services and partners can include health, youth justice, the voluntary and community sector, early help, children’s social care, local safeguarding partnerships, special educational needs, educational psychologists, the police and housing support. Local authorities should encourage shared ownership of attendance improvement across these partners.

The guidance also includes the expectation that local authorities will hold regular targeting support meetings with schools as an opportunity to work collaboratively with them to discuss and agree support approaches for persistently absent pupils.

To support local authorities to implement the expectations in the guidance, including improving collaborative working, the department has offered each authority the support of an expert attendance adviser.

The guidance can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance.