Schools are walking an attendance tightrope as the government ratchets up pressure on reducing stubbornly high absence rates – but parents are becoming more vocal in their opposition to measures to get kids back in the classroom post-Covid. Schools Week investigates …
Schools are having to apologise and scramble to dampen parental anger over proposed attendance policies. In one case, a parent took to social media to tell a secondary: “You do not own my child.”
Leaders say the incident is indicative of heads put in an “impossible position”, as the government increases the pressure to get pupils back into class.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has described absence levels as an “emergency”, with analysis suggesting it has become a bigger issue during inspections.
Parents’ views have changed in a post-Covid world. Research conducted by consultancy Thinks Insight & Strategy, cited by the Department for Education, shows parents “consider small periods of absence from school manageable” and are more concerned about “spreading illnesses”.
The attendance tightrope
Towards the end of last month, Glenmoor and Winton Academies in Bournemouth sent an “attendance pledge” to parents and pupils that required pupils to commit to “always” coming into school, “even if you feel unwell”.
But following a number of comments about the letter’s “tone and content”, principal Leon Lima said: “We got this wrong and apologise for doing so.”
The Neale-Wade Academy in Cambridgeshire was also at the centre of controversy this week after informing parents it would not accept “ill”, “unwell”, “poorly” or “has a cold” as reasons for missing school.
Absences because of period pains also would be listed as unauthorised, “unless we have medical information”.
But Graham Horn, the academy’s principal, said staff had since “written to families to clarify our approach, which does not require medical notes when a student is absent”.
Ellie Costello, a director of the parent-support organisation Square Peg, said the wider attendance challenge was “a tightrope. It’s a balancing act of the two hands of leadership – the boundary, as well as the care – but it is doable.”
Glenmoor, which is part of United Learning Trust, has now said attendance solutions will need the “support of our parent community”, inviting parents to join a “working group” to develop recommendations.
Pepe Di’Iasio, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said most parents understood pupils should attend “every class”, but the “rise of social media has left schools vulnerable to abuse from a vocal minority”.
Costello also said attendance was “nudging on the multiple challenges that are requiring schools to be more things to more people. That’s an impossible ask because it’s exposing all the tensions that are there, the loss of allied services.”
Ofsted scrutiny
Schools are increasingly held to account for their attendance rate, with mentions of “attendance” rising to about 1.7 times every 1,000 words in inspection reports this year, analysis by SchoolDash shows, the highest figure since the start of 2017.
Ofsted said attendance was not scrutinised more than in the past, but rather that “attendance is becoming a more prevalent issue”.
Absence rates are falling, but are still higher than pre-pandemic. However, unauthorised absences are almost 80 per cent higher at secondary than they were before Covid, Education Policy Institute analysis has found.
And there was “a smaller decline in absence rates than others” among disadvantaged children and those with SEND, widening the attendance gap.
Many of the factors behind absences, such as mental health illness, were outside a school’s control and came as attendance services and other forms of support were increasingly inaccessible, Di’Iasio said.
Ofsted reports should “acknowledge the external factors that are making this more challenging, while also taking local context into account”.
Last month Phillipson wrote in The Sunday Times that “too many parents” believed “cheaper holidays, birthday treats or even a runny nose” were reasons not to attend class.
Before the election, then schools minister Baroness Barran claimed boosting the attendance of pupils who missed the “odd day” was the “really big prize” for heads.
Her team discovered 31 per cent of children missed 5 to 15 per cent of school in 2022-23, up from 21 per cent before the pandemic.
‘Don’t be threatening’
The government raised its absence fines from £60 to £80 this school year. If not paid within 28 days, the figure rises to £160.
But Rob Tarn, the chief executive of the Northern Education Trust who was appointed the last government’s attendance tsar, said parents needed to “be trusted to make judgments about whether their children are well enough to get into school”.
“Covid made people very sensitive to respiratory illnesses. I don’t think it’s for schools to be threatening around that, but it is for schools to question when that happens with individual families too much.”
In Yorkshire, Red Kite Learning Trust has this year moved its attendance approach “from penalising parents, to much more about focusing on the culture within our schools”.
The tactic was trialled at Temple Learning Academy in Leeds after an Ofsted inspection report noted a “significant minority of pupils do not attend school as regularly as they should”, despite staff “doing everything they can to improve attendance”
Staff carrying out calls and home visits to absentees now stress to the child they “are being missed”. It also has a “stratified approach” to identify children whose attendance has fallen below particular levels and “allocates resource and individuals to them according to their need”, said Richard Sheriff, Red Kite’s chief executive.
Attendance has risen to 91 per cent, the “highest it’s ever been in the school’s short history”.
One Red Kite primary has also created a “safe space” for parents to gather at pick-up and drop-off times.
“If they’re worried about seeing a teacher, or the headteacher’s going to have a go at them because they’ve missed school, it doesn’t matter, they can come that safe space on site. It’s about making the school less intimidating,” he aid.
Horn said close partnerships with families was important, with the trust working hard “to understand any challenges or difficulties”.
“We very much have an open-doors approach and encourage families to come and talk to us about any worries they have so we can … find a positive way forward.”
Home-school agreements
Many leaders use home-school agreements that set a school’s aims, values, responsibilities and expectations of pupils and parents.
In 2016 the government scrapped a requirement for schools to put the agreements in place. At the time, a DfE spokesperson said the decision was made to “cut red tape” and free schools of a “one-size-fits-all, prescriptive approach to engaging with parents”.
But their use appears to be creeping back. A Teacher Tapp survey found 56 per cent of leaders had such as agreement, up slightly from 55 per cent last year, They were more likely in affluent areas.
Red Kite gives its academies the option of using the agreements. One outlines expectations for pupils to “try my best” to hit its attendance target of more than 95 per cent.
Sheriff said “colds and runny noses aren’t the big issue for us. Often it’s much more fundamental issues associated with mental health … and poverty.
“Most parents are very keen to get their children into school and I don’t think lambasting parents, particularly after what we’ve been through with Covid, is a particularly constructive way of improving attendance.”
Home-school agreements at North Star Community Trust’s schools in London set out expectations that children “arrive on time at school each day” and “family holidays are not taken during term time”.
Marino Charalambous, its chief executive, said 90 to 95 per cent of parents were fine with everything a school did. “It’s the ones that are challenging who you refer back to the home-school agreement.”
A DfE spokesperson said: “We must tackle the national epidemic of school absence”. The department advocated a “support-first approach for children who are facing barriers to regular school attendance”.
