Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what guidance her Department provides to schools on engaging with parents of children of (a) primary and (b) secondary school age in the event that there is persistent absence or school refusal.

The department has a comprehensive strategy to support schools, trusts, and local authorities to tackle school absence, and is supporting schools to engage effectively with parents.

The department’s ‘working together to improve school attendance’ guidance for schools, trusts, and local authorities, which will become statutory in autumn 2024, is clear that engaging with parents and families is central to taking a ‘support first’ approach. The guidance outlines how schools should build strong relationships and work jointly with families, listening to and understanding barriers to attendance and working in partnership with families to remove them. The guidance can be found at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance.

To support schools and local authorities to engage parents, the department has:

• Published a toolkit with practical examples to help schools communicate with parents and carers about school attendance: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance/toolkit-for-schools-communicating-with-families-to-support-attendance.
• Delivered a series of webinars and training sessions for schools over the summer term to support embedding the new attendance guidance.

• Shared, in collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, resources for school staff, parents and carers, and children and young people that support attendance and mental health wellbeing: https://www.mentallyhealthyschools.org.uk/attendance-and-mental-wellbeing-school-college/.

Additionally, as part of the department’s national communication campaign to parents on the importance of school attendance, it has provided schools and local authorities with resources to amplify the campaign and support their communication with parents, which can be found here: https://dfegovukassets.blob.core.windows.net/assets/Attendance%20campaign/Attendance%20campaign%20commuications%20toolkit%20for%20schools.pdf, and here: https://dfegovukassets.blob.core.windows.net/assets/Attendance%20campaign/Attendance%20communications%20toolkit%20for%20local%20authority%20attendance%20teams%20and%20other%20stakeholders.pdf.