Ciara Sims, School Partnerships Officer, ImpactEd
One of the main focuses of schools over the last year has been pupil attendance - where strategies that used to be effective are becoming less so, and the evidence base for what to do is still thin.
At ImpactEd Group, we support schools to measure the impact of their initiatives so that they can focus on what is working best. In response to the attendance challenge we launched a large-scale research project in January 2023. The Understanding Attendance project helps schools and trusts to identify the drivers behind low attendance in their contexts and what initiatives they can put in place to address this. Crucially this is not just about looking at what’s happening with attendance but why it’s happening.
What are we learning?
The project is based on our team’s research into the social, emotional and environmental factors which are predictive of pupil attendance rates. With over 200 participating schools, this evidence is rapidly developing.
Three themes have emerged so far:
-
Sense of community and belonging matters. There is a statistically significant correlation between pupils’ sense of belonging to their school and having higher attendance rates. This is particularly true for female pupils, who score consistently lower in this measure than their male peers, and are more likely to miss school if they don’t feel part of the community.
-
Different stages require different approaches. Our school engagement tool measures pupils’ cognitive, behavioural, and social engagement with school. For pupils in years 9, 10, and 11, the correlation between school engagement and attendance was higher than for younger year groups. Feedback from teachers suggests that this could coincide with the increased difficulty and intensity of the curriculum content at GCSE.
-
Attendance does not exist in isolation. For example, our data suggests that pupil wellbeing is a contributing factor to attendance rates and can affect some pupil subgroups more strongly than others. Pupils with SEND scored lower than pupils without SEND across every question related to wellbeing, particularly in relation to feeling positive about the future, feeling relaxed, and dealing well with problems. There was, in turn, a strong correlation between wellbeing and attendance for this group, with SEND pupils in the bottom 20% of attendance rates scoring particularly low for wellbeing.
Beyond national trends however, one of the most powerful aspects is how schools and school trusts can use better evidence on attendance to drive improvement in their context.
Understanding Attendance in action
Mounts Bay Academy in Cornwall - part of the Leading Edge Academies Partnership - decided to participate in the Understanding Attendance project to better understand the contributing factors to low attendance rates. Amongst other areas, they collected information on pupils’ sense of school membership, wellbeing, attendance behaviours, and grit, a phrase coined by Angela Duckworth to mean emotional resilience and perseverance. Using our digital platform, this was accessed on an individual level and we ran analyses showing the factors most linked to attendance.
So what did we learn?
In line with the national trends, Mounts Bay found a link between their pupils’ sense of school membership and their attendance rates. Question level analysis revealed that pupils who felt more disconnected from the school community and/or less proud of the school were less likely to attend. Attendance behaviour data also showed that pupils were worrying about the consequences of lateness which sometimes influenced their decision to not attend at all. Mounts Bay will be reviewing their late procedures to ensure that pupils understand that the value of coming to school outweighs any results of being late. Other influencing factors were pupils’ morning routines, with those making time for breakfast being more likely to attend school.
These analyses are important because they help focus the limited time available on the initiatives that are likely to make the biggest difference to attendance. As the project uses our digital platform, it also enables Mounts Bay to drill into this data on an individual pupil basis, and to use these same measures later in the year to track the impact of additional support.
What next?
We are actively expanding the Understanding Attendance project. The more schools that collaborate, the better evidence we can share on what approaches are making a difference. And ultimately, the more schools are able to understand the drivers of attendance in their setting, the more targeted they can be.
If you’d be interested in participating in the project, please get in touch. And if you’d like to hear more about its findings, we are leading a seminar for CST members on Thursday 23 November on what we have learnt so far.
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
Image: Mche Lee / Unsplash
