Up to 10 multi-academy trusts are lined up to establish attendance hubs after education secretary Gillian Keegan urged sector leaders to get involved, Tes has learned.
The rollout of the programme follows a pilot project run by Northern Education Trust, which involved around 60 schools working together to tackle absence.
The idea behind the hubs is that a lead school will share its approaches on attendance with a network of schools that have similar cohorts and challenges.
Although Northern Education Trust launched the pilot, only one of its schools, North Shore Academy, in Stockton-on-Tees, is part of the hub.
Rob Tarn, chief executive of Northern Education Trust, had presented the achievements of his North Shore pilot, which has helped to spread attendance best practice across schools, at the January meeting of the government’s Attendance Action Alliance, which was chaired by schools minister Nick Gibb.
Sharing best practice to tackle school absence
Ms Keegan recently invited a selection of trusts to establish their own attendance hubs and several trusts have already expressed an interest, according to the minutes from the meeting.
Mr Tarn said: “The idea came to me that it was possible to look at the academic performance of similar schools, and there were networks out there where schools with similar contexts could share ideas around leadership, but we didn’t have anything out there where people could come together and share ideas on attendance.
“I know that it is important that schools are given ideas that are going to be relevant to their context, so for our hub we started it with one of our schools, North Shore Academy, and have looked to involve schools with similar challenges.”
As part of this programme, North Shore, which has 65 per cent of pupils eligible for pupil premium funding, has shared strategies and resources for improving attendance.
The pilot, which launched just under a year ago, was aimed at secondary schools with a similar context and challenges to North Shore
Schools participating in the pilot have access to documents and training videos explaining the school’s attendance processes and systems in detail.
In return, pilot schools commit to review the systems and protocols they have in place for managing attendance, drawing on the lessons from North Shore.
Participating schools are also expected to join half-termly review meetings.
Although North Shore has been the lead school in the programme, with Mr Tarn initially chairing it, the role of chair now moves between other schools in the hub.
Mr Tarn said: “Through a portal we not only share our resources but we have also got a video company in to put together footage of our staff talking about how they work and the approaches we use. As a larger trust, we were able to put that together.”
The Attendance Action Alliance was convened by former education secretary Nadhim Zahawi to bring together leaders from across the education, social care and health sectors to address lower levels of school attendance since the Covid pandemic.
It has begun meeting again under Ms Keegan.
Now Mr Tarn has told Tes that he is due to have a meeting later this month with 10 trusts that have agreed to establish their own attendance hubs.
“I am delighted that this approach is now being scaled up. If these 10 hubs reach a similar scale we would be talking about 600 schools working together in a group of hubs,” he said.
“Now I don’t know whether all of the ideas that are put forward will work across all of the schools involved but if we are to bring together hundreds of school leaders and teachers to obsess about attendance then that alone is something. Attendance is very much the challenge of our time.”
Attendance has become a high-profile education policy issue since the onset of the Covid pandemic.
The Commons Education Select Committee launched an inquiry into persistent absence this year.
Government figures published last month show that persistent absence through illness last term was more than double the levels seen immediately before the pandemic.
The Department for Education has been approached for comment.
