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<p>This Government understands how important school attendance is for pupils’ education,
wellbeing, and life chances. The Department’s approach to tackling attendance is a
support-first strategy.</p><p></p><p>The Department published stronger expectations
of schools, trusts, governing bodies and Local Authorities in the ‘Working together
to improve school attendance’ guidance. Schools are now expected to publish an attendance
policy, appoint an attendance champion, and use data to identify and then support
pupils at risk of becoming persistently absent. The Department deployed 10 expert
attendance advisers to work with 155 Local Authorities and trusts to review practices,
develop plans to improve and meet expectations set out in the guidance. To help identify
children at risk of persistent absence and to enable early intervention, the Department
established a timelier flow of pupil level attendance data through the daily attendance
data collection. The ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance can
be found here: <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance"
target="_blank">https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance</a>.</p><p></p><p>The
launch of the £2.32 million attendance mentor pilot aims to deliver intensive one-to-one
support to a group of persistently and severely absent pupils from year 6 through
to year 11. The findings from this pilot should enable schools, trusts, and Local
Authorities to address persistent and severe absence more effectively. The Department
recently launched new attendance hubs with ten lead schools sharing their effective
practice on attendance with up to 600 partner schools, reaching hundreds of thousands
of pupils. This is alongside intensive support to children in need through Virtual
Schools Heads.</p><p></p><p>The Secretary of State and I co-chair the ‘Attendance
Action Alliance’ of national system leaders to work to remove barriers to attendance
and reduce absence through pledges. This is in addition to the £5 billion that has
been made available for education recovery, helping pupils to recover from the disruption
of the COVID-19 pandemic. This funding includes up to £1.5 billion on tutoring and
nearly £2 billion of direct funding to schools so they can deliver evidence-based
interventions based on pupil needs.</p>
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