The government has outlined a raft of new proposals for boosting pupil attendance in schools - something the minister for school standards, Robin Walker, has said is “crucial to pupils’ attainment, wellbeing and wider life chances”.

The proposals - brought forward after a consultation that saw an array of responses from leaders, teachers and parents - include a new national system of fines for non-attendance as well as bringing multi-academy trust requirements on granting leave of absence in line with state-funded schools.

Perhaps most notably for school leaders, though, is the call for schools to develop a specific “written school attendance policy” that the Department for Education (DfE) says will help drive a “whole-school culture of high attendance, underpinned by clear expectations, procedures and responsibilities”.

A legal requirement 

What’s more, the DfE said it would like to see schools have these in place for the start of the next academic year - just four months away.

At present, the guidance is non-statutory, so schools could, if they wanted, ignore the request.

However, they won’t be able to do that for long, as the government hopes to make this a legal requirement in the future, specifiying on page 18 that the secretary of state “plans to legislate at the earliest opportunity to introduce a new statutory duty on proprietors to ensure such a policy is produced, published and regularly publicised”.

So, the reality appears to be that yet another top-down requirement on schools has arrived - although it should be noted that, among consultation respondents at least, such an idea was not viewed as abhorrent.

Specifically, when asked the question, “Do you agree that all schools should be required to publish an attendance policy?” 798 of the 1,640 responses received said they “strongly agreed” while 369 “somewhat agreed”.

Conversely, only 318 in total either “strongly disagreed” or “somewhat disagreed”.

Updating what exists

It’s possible that many of the respondents did not view this as an onerous requirement because, as James Bowen, head of policy at the NAHT union, noted, it is something that the vast majority of settings already have in place.

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a school that doesn’t have an attendance policy,” Mr Bowen told Tes.

“So, I think the overwhelming majority of schools will already have attendance policies because they need those in place to communicate clearly with parents and families.”

Nevertheless, if the government wants to one day require that such policies exist as a point of law, it is fair to ask exactly what it believes they should contain, so schools can see how their current efforts measure up.

Helpfully for schools, the government has broken down exactly what it thinks a school attendance policy should include, which we have reproduced here in full from page 11 of the new guidance:

• The attendance and punctuality expectations of pupils and parents, including start and close of the day, register closing times, and the processes for requesting leaves of absence and informing the school of the reason for an unexpected absence.
• The name and contact details of the senior leader responsible for the strategic approach to attendance in school.
• Information and contact details of the school staff member that pupils and parents should contact about attendance on a day-to-day basis (such as a form tutor or attendance officer), and for more detailed support on attendance (such as a head of year, pastoral lead or family liaison officer).
• The school’s day-to-day processes for managing attendance. For example, first-day calling and processes to follow up on unexplained absence.
• How the school is promoting and incentivising good attendance.
• The school’s strategy for using data to target attendance improvement efforts to the pupils or pupil cohorts who need it most.
• The school’s strategy for reducing persistent and severe absence, including how access to wider support services will be provided to remove the barriers to attendance and when support will be formalised in conjunction with the local authority.
• The point at which fixed-penalty notices for absence and other sanctions will be sought, if support is not appropriate (for example, for an unauthorised holiday in term time), not successful or not engaged with.

The DfE also said schools should ensure that this document is easily accessible on school websites and sent to parents when their child starts at the school, and then subsequently at the start of each school year or if the policy is updated.

Notably, the DfE said that if a school does update this policy document, it “should seek the views of pupils and parents” when doing so.

It also said that schools with borders will need to ensure the document is written in such a way to reflect the requirement of their attendance.

Finally, the DfE said the “attendance policy should account for the specific needs of certain pupils” and, although the policy must be applied “fairly and consistently”, schools must also “consider the individual needs of pupils and their families who have specific barriers to attendance”.

This might sound like a lot but Bowen said there should be nothing too alarming in it, noting that while some aspects may require “small tweaks”, most were probably what schools do already.

Wider support lacking

Pepe Di’Iasio, headteacher of Wales High School in Sheffield, agreed, saying that because most schools “already have attendance policies” it should not be too problematic to meet this requirement. He also said it was not unreasonable for the DfE to want to bring “clarity and consistency” to this area.

But while Mr Di’Iasiofelt that talking about schools’ role around attendance was fair, he was concerned that the government’s new guidance had nothing to say about pushing support services to do more to boost attendance.

“By far the bigger issue is getting under the skin of the reasons why pupils are persistently absent, and ensuring there are high-quality support services available for schools to refer children and young people to if necessary - particularly around mental health issues.

“This new guidance does nothing to address that issue.”

Lawyers Nicola Tarmey and Yvonne Spencer, from VWV, raised similar concerns, noting that without investment in support services, the penultimate point in the list - requiring schools to have a strategy for reducing persistent absence - would be “very hard to deliver”, which could be problematic if it is a legal requirement.

“The reasons for children’s non-attendance can be complex and can arise from factors such as children’s unmet SEND (special educational needs and disability), mental health problems, a family dynamic that is in crisis, gangs and criminal exploitation,” they said.

“Unless there are commensurate statutory obligations on local authorities, health services (including Camhs) and the police to explain and deliver their part in securing school attendance, schools may be left without essential support that will be needed to achieve improved attendance, due to the strain that already exists on these external services.”   

Yet more guidance but no answers

The fact that the support services aspect was absent from the proposal was, said Mr Bowen, another example of the DfE being stuck in “guidance mode” and trying to get schools to fix everything without any support.

“They got very used to putting out lots of guidance and so now there is an enormous amount...being pumped out to schools. This is a 60-page document just on attendance, which is just one aspect of the school’s work,” he said

“So, I do think schools are getting frustrated with just the sheer amount of guidance that’s being pushed out to them at the moment - there doesn’t seem to be much recognition from government about the amount of paperwork they’re pushing on schools.”

There will, at least, be some time until this requirement becomes law - if, indeed, it follows the path that the DfE has set out. And we may see the government also set out how it will augment the services around schools to support attendance.

In the meantime, though, it seems that schools might want to look again at their attendance policies and compare them with the bullet points above to see how they stack up - and start redrafting if required.

Dan Worth is senior editor at Tes