Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure dissemination of best practice between schools and education authorities on combating pupil absenteeism.

Regular attendance at school is vital for pupils’ education, wellbeing, and long-term development. To support stronger attendance, the department has a comprehensive attendance strategy in place to ensure that absence is minimised.

Last year, the department published new attendance guidance setting out stronger and clearer expectations for how schools, trusts and local authorities should work together to address barriers to pupil attendance. These expectations were based on key best practice approaches that schools and local authorities use to improve or sustain attendance levels.

At a national level, the Secretary of State has also established an alliance of national leaders from education, children’s social care and allied services to work together to raise school attendance, reduce persistent absence, and share good practice approaches.

The department has also facilitated a series of webinars for schools, trusts and Local Authorities sharing effective approaches to improving attendance which have been cumulatively viewed nearly 50,000 times. The webinars are recorded and available for viewing here: https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/improving-attendance-good-practice-for-schools-and-multi-academy-trusts.

The department has also recently launched a number of school attendance hubs. Attendance hubs are led by senior leaders in schools with strong attendance practice, in some of the largest trusts in the country. As part of the hubs programme, lead schools extensively share their strategies and resources for improving attendance through regular meetings with other schools. The department has announced nine new attendance hubs which will be supporting hundreds of schools, and the department intend to scale up the hubs programme in the autumn term of next year.

Finally, the department has also deployed ten expert attendance advisers who, so far, are working with 115 local authorities and 45 trusts to develop effective attendance improvement action plans.