Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to improve school attendance rates.

The Department has a comprehensive attendance strategy to improve school attendance.  Recent guidance has been published setting out how schools, trusts and Local Authorities are expected to work together to improve attendance, which is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance.

The 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 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.

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 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.

The Secretary of State has also 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.

The Department launched new attendance hubs with the Ofsted Outstanding Northern Education Trust. There are now 10 lead schools sharing their effective practice on attendance with up to 600 partner schools, reaching hundreds of thousands of pupils. This is alongside intensive support to Children in Need through Virtual Schools Heads.

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.