Inclusion

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.

Moving forward together: Raising Gypsy, Roma and Traveller achievement

Raising the attainment of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali and Turkish heritage pupils: CPD modules

• Module 2: Making effective use of data

  This module supports schools to make effective use of their ethnicity data in order to raise attainment. This section is to further strengthen the understanding of issues related to raising the attainment of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali and Turkish heritage pupils in secondary schools.

Improving attendance and reducing persistent absence

• Overview

  Overview of the pages of the Improving attendance manual.

• Section 3: Identifying how data can most effectively be used to inform actions

  Guidance on data collection and analysis to improve attendance. Links to various supporting documents including a PowerPoint of average earnings by highest qualification (GCSE, A Levels, degrees) in English regions.

• Section 4: Providing whole staff training

  Approaches to whole staff training including support staff, site manager and others as well as teachers. Includes guidance and links on attendance codes.

• Section 5: Ensuring that schools fulfil minimum requirements

  Minimum requirements of absence reduction in four parts: Use of the persistent absence framework and the reporting proforma for schools; Ongoing identification of pupils who are on track to have or already have persistent absence; Pupil profiling; Development of formal support systems.

• Attendance advice for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children

  This advice gives information for parents and carers of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children and those who work with them in schools and local authorities. (DCSF ref: 00891-2008FLY-EN)

• Guidance for academies

  This area identifies effective practice that academies may wish to adopt when considering attendance policy and practice.

• Resources and acknowledgements

  Links to resources associated with the Improving attendance and reducing persistent absence manual.