Attendance mentoring pilot to commence this term

The Department for Education is launching a three-year, one-to-one attendance mentoring pilot from this term, aimed at tackling the factors behind non-attendance such as bullying or mental health issues. It is being launched in Middlesbrough this year, before expanding to other areas of the country next year. The pilot will provide tailored support to over 1,600 persistently and severely absent pupils over the three-year period.

This is part of a package of new measures to ensure that more children are in school every day, including targeted support for individuals who need it and improved data tools that will better identify and solve consistent issues.

Schools, academy trusts, local authorities and the government will also have access to a new attendance data visualisation tool to help to spot and respond to issues. This data is supporting the launch of the new, interactive national attendance dashboard alongside the publication of the first full fortnightly attendance data of the term. This is expected later in September and will provide ongoing transparency and vastly improved potential for insight and analysis of daily, weekly and termly trends.

The majority of schools are now seamlessly sharing daily register data with the department, where it is aggregated and presented back in dashboards to schools, academy trusts and local authorities. This enables teachers to analyse attendance with greater ease, allowing issues with individual pupils, or groups such as children on free school meals, for example, to be spotted more quickly.

The government is also introducing a range of tools and programmes to tackle low attendance, including new best practice guidance on improving attendance for schools, trusts and local authorities. The guidance makes clear that schools should provide individualised support to families that need it, for example through referrals to other organisations and services, including councils, and issue fines and other sanctions where absence is unauthorised.