Transfer and transition

Children's services attendance effective practice

• Children's services support for attendance

  Children's services procedures should be addressed as a first step in strategically approaching attendance improvement.

• Children's services attendance strategy document

  The children's services attendance strategy should outline the vision of the children's services, explaining the role that all members of the community have in improving attendance and reducing persistent absence and promoting attendance.

• Proactive interventions

  Children's services have a key role in helping schools in identifying and addressing key priorities, which are informed by rigorous and robust data analysis, to ensure all pupils are able to engage in all the opportunities offered to them.

• Parental responsibility measures

  School-level intervention should always precede referral for external support services. However, children's services have a legal obligation to consider parental responsibility measures in some circumstances.

• Children's services engagement with key partners

• Review of attendance practice

  Children's services should use the strand-specific self-review tool for attendance and appraise their own performance/situation accordingly.

• Identifying how data can most effectively be used to inform actions

  Guidance for the senior leadership team within children's services to avoid being 'data rich' but 'information poor', and tools to help gain a clear understanding of their attendance profile.

• Data analysis tools

  Children's services should also analyse the data to determine whether absence is greater in certain groups of pupils. It therefore should analyse absence by special educational needs (SEN), ethnicity, gender, academic progress, and so on. The tracking of vulnerable groups is very important.

• Target setting and proactive interventions

  Children's services should use robust baselines to support the target-setting process. On an annual basis, all schools must set an overall absence target and children's services must set a target to reduce the percentage of pupils in secondary schools with persistent absence.

• Data linking attendance to attainment

  Attendance has an impact on attainment, and children's services should understand the impact on pupil attendance within their LA.