The national attendance challenge in England is alarming. More than 1.5 million children are persistently absent from school - enough to fill every seat in every Premier League football stadium and more.

This poses significant challenges not only to the education system but also to the prospects of young people.

In response, the Department for Education has announced an expansion of the attendance mentors scheme into 10 additional areas to test a new, evidence-based approach aimed at addressing this growing national challenge. Etio is proud to be delivering this new programme for the DfE.

How it will work

The heart of the programme is to test if short mentoring interventions, for approximately 12 weeks, will make a measurable impact on improving school attendance.

There has been an existing attendance mentors pilot (run by the charity Barnardo’s), which has been delivered in five priority areas since 2022.

Through our separate initiative, about 40 schools across 10 different areas in England will receive support from dedicated mentors, working with cohorts of students who are persistently absent.

Each school will have an assigned mentor who, in collaboration with the school’s leadership team, will identify and address the root causes of each pupil’s absenteeism.

The structure of the programme is based on a “ground-up” approach, incorporating expertise from two regional directors: one with a specialism in mentoring and the other in attendance. This allows for a targeted intervention while ensuring that the mentors can operate within the unique context of each school.

The mentor will work closely with a small group of about 25 students over a structured timeline, in one-to-one sessions with the students, helping to identify the barriers to regular attendance and putting together tailored support packages to address these challenges.

The mentors’ role is to engage directly with students and act as conduits for accessing the wide array of existing support mechanisms (such as local authority support, national helplines and community resources).

They will leverage resources both within the school and through our external partners, such as Oasis Community Learning, who bring expertise in parental engagement. This collaborative approach ensures that students receive the right support tailored to their needs.

One of the unique aspects of this programme is its capacity to drill down beyond the surface-level reasons for absence, which often go beyond illness or obvious behavioural problems. Our approach allows for a deeper exploration of the underlying causes, opening up the possibility for more specific referrals, and providing students and schools with access to the right resources at the right time.

Evaluation and impact

Having delivered DfE programmes in careers guidance, employability and skills for more than 15 years, I know the importance of measuring impact. The success of this programme will depend on how effectively we track and evaluate its outcomes.

With robust evaluation methodologies folded into the design - including a randomised controlled trial evaluation through the Youth Endowment Fund - we are focusing on understanding not only if the programme works but how and, crucially, why.

Tracking data at multiple levels, from regional directors down to individual schools and mentors, allows us to create a clear picture of which interventions are most effective.

The potential impact of the attendance mentors scheme goes beyond the individual students and schools involved.

One of the programme’s objectives is to share best practice across schools and regions. By embedding mentors into schools’ attendance strategies, we aim to create a more resilient system, one that is better equipped to deal with the complexities of persistent absenteeism.

Wider learnings

For schools, this programme will present a new resource that is both targeted and flexible. The mentor, working closely with each school’s senior leadership team, will become an integral part of the attendance improvement process.

Through their involvement in attendance meetings and their ability to pull in external resources, mentors will help create a holistic support system that benefits not only the individual students but each school’s wider attendance approach.

By focusing on the granular reasons behind absenteeism, building up our pupils’ resilience and confidence through targeted mentorship and working with referral networks to make solutions more accessible, we hope to empower both students and schools.

The long-term goal is that schools can integrate these learnings into their systems, creating a sustainable model for tackling absenteeism across the sector.

To find out more about becoming an attendance mentor, visit etioglobal.org

Laura Bell is attendance mentor programme director at Etio

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