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Attendance Post Updated

This is my 66th blog post. I have been doing this for a few months now, and I think I am slowly getting better at it. So, I thought it might be fun to revisit some of the first posts I wrote back in November last year, re-edit them, and hopefully improve them.

I have chosen to start with the post I wrote about attendance because I feel like I am now better able to explain my position on this sensitive issue more clearly. I also have some new information to add to what I originally wrote, which adds weight to my argument. I won't delete the original post, though, just in case anybody wants to read it to compare the two.

School attendance is what you would call a 'hot button issue' at the moment, and quite rightly, it has been in focus since the end of the pandemic. Ofsted identified it as a priority in their annual report at the end of last year, and no one would argue that schools are right to continue to aim for the highest possible level of attendance.

It seems to me, though, that the drive to improve attendance has become something close to an obsession for schools. They are attacking the issue with a sledgehammer rather than the pair of needle-nosed pliers they should be using. I fully accept that this is a clumsy phrase, but the old 'sledgehammer to crack a nut' expression didn't seem to fit.

What I mean by this is that rather than focusing on the relatively small number of families for whom attendance is a genuine concern, they are attempting to raise attendance across the board, including for those children in the 95% plus bracket, whose attendance was already in line with the national average. By doing this I believe that they are making two huge mistakes:

  1. They are devoting too much time and energy to this issue, attention which should be focused on other, more pressing challenges that schools are facing on a day-to-day basis
  2. They are risking inflicting further damage on relationships with families, relationships which have already taken a bit of a battering in recent years 

For a child, 94% attendance means missing about 8 days of school over the course of the year. Younger children, in particular, are often ill, and although the expectation on teachers is super high now, we haven't quite reached the point where we are expected to provide a medical service. Sending letters and threatening families if attendance drops below 94% is not what we should be doing.

Surely, there is room for nuance and for building in some flexibility in terms of authorising term-time absences, for example. If a child missing a few days of school is the difference between succeeding and failing, we need to take a long, hard look at our practice. I forget where exactly I saw it, I think it was on Twitter, but I read the argument being made that it was wrong for 'enrichment' activities to be seen as perfectly fine if they are put on by the school, but not so if parents dare to provide them in term time for their own children. My position was aligned with that of the Twitter sage, I always tried to hear the parent out, look at a pupil's overall attendance, and then make a sensitive decision, which was often to authorise (I am able to say that now that I am no longer working in a school as I don't think the L.A. can tell me off!)

I can't help thinking that schools are focusing on this measurable issue so that they can pat themselves on the back when attendance improves rather than focusing on the bigger and more important issues. Obviously, we need to step in for the small number of families where concerns arise, but the amount of time spent on addressing low-level attendance issues in schools is ridiculous.

When I left my last school, the position of the next headteacher regarding absences was very different to mine. The tone of communications changed; parents were threatened, lateness was 'cracked down on', and absences were unauthorised. Considerable effort was made to raise overall attainment, which was around 94% when I left nearly a year ago. I had a quick look at their latest newsletter, which was published last week, and after all that has been done in my absence, you'll never guess what their attendance is for this academic year...

94%

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