Attendance: What works

For schools and colleges looking to delve a little deeper into the five ‘best bets’ for improving attendance and punctuality, SSAT will be running two webinars.

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Creating a positive culture around attendance to better engage families

Thursday 28 January 2025, 16.00 – 17.30

In this first of two webinars, we will be exploring what recent attendance research evidence has to say about school culture and family engagement. The session will focus on how schools emphasise belonging for pupils and families, the role of stakeholder voice and leadership in this, and how schools get right the tricky balance between positive messaging and firmness around sanctions. We will consider how families often seen as ‘hard to reach’ might be more helpfully considered as ‘easy to ignore’, and what this means for staff development, communication processes and more responsive school self-evaluation

Using attendance data effectively to better target interventions

Thursday 13 March 2025, 16.00 – 17.30

In this second of two webinars, we will be exploring what recent attendance research evidence has to say about data processes and effective interventions. The session will focus on how schools get under the bonnet of their attendance data in order to have a more proactive approach that pre-empts attendance issues or deals with them at an earlier stage, before absence becomes persistent or severe. We will consider how schools might better align hard and soft data to better identify and respond to the key drivers of absence for students and families in your setting, making interventions more timely, nuanced and effective.

Host information

Dr Keven Bartle, Senior Education Lead, SSAT

Keven has been a teacher for almost three decades and was headteacher at a richly diverse secondary school in London for nine years. Through his career, Keven has been committed to the power of education for social justice and transformation, working in schools where staff make a difference to the lives of children, families and communities.

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