Since the pandemic, tackling school absence has been a major topic of focus for school leaders and policymakers as they seek to improve attendance rates.

Of course, though, improving attendance and punctuality is always good practice for schools as any improvements that are made can have a notable impact on outcomes.

Reinforcing this to parents and pupils through letters home or assemblies is, of course, part and parcel of the work schools do - but there are other tools that can help, which may not be immediately obvious for this purpose, such as social media.

For example, in my school, we used Facebook and Instagram as part of an attendance and punctuality campaign.

We chose these platforms as we know our Facebook page for the school is used by parents while Instagram is used by pupils. As such, sharing content across these two platforms was the best way of hitting both target groups.

These pages have grown organically since being launched and we have a dedicated team that runs them from our communications team.

Having a team to manage this is important as you need to make sure someone has oversight of what is being posted and when, respond to any comments or replies you may receive, and ensure careful coordination of the posts to ensure the campaign is properly structured.

Doing this meant we posted throughout the school week over a four-week period towards the end of term, where we know attendance usually declines.

To try and tackle this, we made sure the posts highlighted the link that attendance and being on time have on outcomes, and we also posted around ensuring students were fully engaging with homework instructions, too, including completing it on time.

The posts themselves also featured regular phrases and hashtags to help create a sense of a campaign around this, with phrases like being “fully present” and “bring our A-game every day”, with #ShowUpOnTime and #ShowUp also used.

Another key component of this work was to ensure it linked to non-digital elements of the campaign, too, with posters around the school mimicking the posts students would have seen on Instagram.

In one post used to underline the importance of attendance, the poster was broken down into a checklist-type image with six tick boxes.

We printed off this same image and put it around the school, reinforcing the message pupils were seeing, whether in school or on their devices.

What was the impact?

Interestingly, we saw more engagement from users of Instagram (most likely students) than users on Facebook (most likely parents), possibly because students are more familiar with the expectation to engage with posts.

What’s more, while attendance did still decline somewhat - as expected - we definitely saw more conversations among pupils and parents around attendance and punctuality and we hope that by building on this, we can continue to improve attendance and punctuality rates.  

Overall, although the campaign required some careful upfront planning, the actual implementation was relatively straightforward and can play a major role going forward in how we continue to work on boosting attendance and punctuality - particularly towards the end of term.

What’s more, there is no doubt that there is more we could do with social media in the future as well for any similar campaigns, such as on YouTube and TikTok, as these are very popular with our students.

Of course, we have to ensure we understand the platform properly and use it in a way that has real benefits but, as schools around the world battle to ensure pupils are in schools and ready to learn, anything that can play a part in this effort should be considered carefully.

Ayisat Fashola has held school leadership positions in the UK, UAE and Qatar. She is currently head of science at an independent school in Sydney, Australia