Until relatively recently, it was understood by everyone involved in caring for children, including the children themselves, that they needed to be in school every day unless they were truly unwell.

I have watched as that shared understanding has frayed. We are now dealing with an attendance crisis that sees too many children not just absent, but persistently absent.

Schools report greater mental health challenges among their students and increases in both the numbers and complexity of special educational needs and disabilities.

A ‘culture of disengagement’

These issues can all contribute towards what the Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel De Souza recently described as a ‘culture of disengagement’ since the pandemic.

Clearly something must be done - children must be in school and engaged with their learning. If we are going to turn the tide, we need a genuine step change.

I was involved in The London Challenge in the early 2000s. It was designed to facilitate rapid school improvement through peer-to-peer support and hard-edged collaboration, among a whole range of approaches.

It made a positive contribution - one of many - to turning some of the worst-performing local authorities into some of the best. A contribution we try to build upon through our work at Challenge Partners today, helping schools collaborate to improve each other and the education system as a whole.

Reflecting on my time with The London Challenge, I am convinced we made progress because of a shared sense of partnership and purpose between schools. As a group of committed practitioners, we collectively owned the problem ourselves, embracing high levels of challenge and support.

Rigour and collaboration

This same enthusiasm for rigour, collaboration and action now sits at the heart of a new commission, established by ImpactEd Group, which I’m proudly chairing; the Research Commission on Engagement and Lead Indicators.

Schools intuitively know that student engagement matters. Research from the United States shows that it can be a lead indicator for attendance, attainment and life outcomes.

But we haven’t yet tapped into this information to support schools to tackle these challenges further upstream, before they become ingrained in a child’s behaviour and performance.

More on attendance:

• Punitive measures to cut absence ‘no longer work’
• How do you solve a problem like school attendance?
• Unauthorised absence rising but attendance has improved

In what will be England’s first study on student engagement, the Commission will collect data from more than 100,000 children and young people at primary and secondary schools across the country at different, fixed points throughout the academic year.

Data collection will be undertaken by The Engagement Platform (TEP). Commissioners will use the findings to determine if student engagement trends are acting as lead indicators, or early warning signals, for fluctuations in attendance or attainment.

Actions and insights

Crucially, the data will be shared in a way that is actionable. Participating schools and trusts will be able to use analysis of their own data, benchmarked against the wider study, to support pupils in their own settings who are heading towards disengagement.

The project’s 23 Commissioners come from across the education sector, including large and small academy trusts, local authorities and organisations such as Challenge Partners, ImpactEd Group, ASCL, Reach Foundation and the Confederation of School Trusts.

At the launch this week, Commissioners discussed why this work matters, expressing concern that too many are left behind and recognising that engagement could be the key. If we can improve what children think, feel and do in their approach to school, we can make a difference.

To paraphrase the great Sir Tim Brighouse, unless we start with the classrooms in our schools, we have no hope for our society.

We already have more than 30 academy trusts and local authorities taking part in the research, and we are pleased to say we are opening up this opportunity to more - and, it’s free to take part.

If you are interested in getting involved, get in touch at hello@tep.uk.

Ultimately, we are launching this Commission because we believe that if we can find evidence-informed ways to support pupils to hook back into their full school experience and re-engage in their learning, then we absolutely must do so.

We can’t wait to share the findings in summer term.

Dame Sue John, Chair of the Research Commission on Engagement and Lead Indicators