Agenda item

Presentation

Jennifer Hardy, Head of Access to Learning, delivered the presentation entitled Nottingham City Council: Working Together to Improve School Attendance, highlighting the following points:

a)  the Working Together to Improve School Attendance guidance was issued by the Department for Education in 2022, and is due to become statutory guidance in August 2024. Nottingham has been operating as if the guidance is statutory for a year to prepare for the shift. The guidance outlines the responsibilities of schools and local authorities to tackle problems with attendance, and includes specific guidance regarding those who struggle to attend school due to health reasons, including mental health reasons;

b)  early intervention and partnership working are key to the guidance. Local authorities are expected to have a strategic approach to improving attendance, and a team to manage it. They should work across teams, across regions, and in partnership with OFSTED and the DfE. Best practice should be shared between schools, access to services improved, and severely absent children prioritised to mitigate safeguarding concerns;

c)  the Education Welfare team has a key role, organising and chairing support meetings and supporting schools, including with formal and legal options around attendance. They will also monitor daily attendance data covering every child in the City, which is a new policy the DfE are making statutory;

d)  health-related absence is significant in Nottingham. One of the biggest upcoming changes is that, from September, schools will be expected to refer students to the local authority after fifteen days of absence for health reasons, and the local authority will become responsible for their education. This will mean establishing a new arm for the service and commissioning new interventions. Referrals have started to be received from parents directly, who have found template letters online. The service will be developing a new policy alongside schools ready for the next academic year, which will clarify the responsibilities of the local authority;

e)  prosecution for absence is an option, though it is the last resort. When the guidance was launched, the updated fixed penalty notice was a key message picked up in the media;

f)  the team now have access to a lot of new data, via the new DfE portal, comprising attendance information for 52,000 children. This will help in targeting support to the right areas, and picking up trends as they arise. The team is working on a dashboard to ensure this data can be used in an effective way;

g)  there are additional statutory amendments to take account of. School registration codes have been amended, and local authorities must submit data to the DfE on Children Missing in Education and Elective Home Education. There is a new national framework governing penalty notices for absences;

h)  the key message is that it is crucial to embed partnership working across all of the organisations making up the partnership.

Liz Anderson, Education Consultant, delivered the presentation entitled Nottingham Priority Education Investment Area: Attendance, highlighting the following points:

i)  as part of the Levelling Up agenda, the government has announced twenty four Priority Education Investment Areas, including Nottingham and Derby. This means funding coming into the City, and the establishment of a partnership board including local authority representatives, academy trust representatives, and representatives from the universities. The DfE’s main priority is around improving literacy and numeracy, and attendance is a key issue; 

j)  in Nottingham, overall attendance is just below the national average, but persistent absenteeism (regarding students attending less than 90% of lessons) is higher. Before Covid-19 this figure was around 14% for all schools, and has now reached over 20%. Covid-19 has made a significant difference to attendance figures, and has led to a change in attitudes towards school attendance across the country and globally;

k)  there are concerns that Nottingham has become disjointed, across many different academy trusts, and the project aims to pull schools together and share best practice in improving attendance and tackling persistent absenteeism;

l)  the project has three main waves, operating concurrently:

  i.  wave 1 is universal, targeted at all schools and academies, with a focus on children with attendance largely above 70%. This involves sharing good practice and promoting continual professional development;

  ii.  wave 2 is a partnership with Raleigh Education Trust to form a taskforce, focused on students vulnerable to involvement in criminal activity when absent from school. This builds on a team already in place working with children who have been excluded but were not attending alternative provision, which has doubled and now has eight practitioners;

  iii.  wave 3 involves a team of six family support workers, based in communities across the City, to support families to improve attendance. This stream of work focuses on children with attendance between 40% and 70%, who are not already working with a social worker or on a Child in Need plan. Schools refer students to the local authority, and cases are heard at a triage meeting which determines whether a taskforce or a family support approach is most appropriate.

m)  Statistics show that Nottingham is not far behind in terms of overall attendance, but while persistent absence is reducing it is still a concern. The team did not want to present the data as a league table of schools, so focused on wards across the City for their data sets. This allowed the team to target the four wards with the lowest attendance initially. Nationally, data shows that the group with the lowest attendance is white British disadvantaged girls. In Nottingham, the lowest attending are white British boys, who are more likely to have Special Educational Needs and be disadvantaged. 551 children were identified in the 40%-70% attendance group initially, which has dropped slightly to 521 as of early March;

n)  the focus on wards means working with secondary and primary schools in the target ward or just outside of it. Of the original four wards, Aspley has seen a slight improvement, Bestwood a significant improvement, Bulwell has slipped slightly since the February half-term, and Clifton East has seen improvement. The team intend to include the next two target wards, Hyson Green and Basford, soon;

o)  the team are actively engaged with twenty one primary schools and eight secondary schools. When a student requiring support is identified, the Attendance Project Lead will conduct a school visit initially to gather the context and assess the suitability of intervention;

p)  a launch event was held in November at Trent Vineyard, focusing on the literacy and attendance strands. It included headteachers, literacy leaders, and attendance leaders, and 95% of City schools were represented. Additionally, a recent meeting of the Designated Safeguarding Lead network focused on attendance;

q)  the number of cases triaged and accepted is provided in the presentation, with 78 individual cases accepted and eighteen cases closed after a six week cycle, while 78% of cases have seen improved attendance;

r)  the government is running an attendance campaign nationally, with new visual material and posters provided to schools. Leaflets have been sent to all homes in the target wards after Easter, to help promote regular school attendance, and there are plans for a City-wide campaign;

s)  it is important to look at individual circumstances, engage with families and seek to provide support, rather than just nagging parents. The new data sets are useful, but will take time to interpret and to ensure reliability. It is crucial to shift the narrative about attendance more broadly, and create a whole-school approach to improving attendance rather than just relying on the attendance officer. A conference was held on the 17^th May which sought to focus on the positive message around engagement, and the next steps are to broaden that out to work with community groups and parents.

In the discussion which followed, and in response to questions from the Committee, the following points were made:

t)  the Violence Reduction Partnership is keen to support initiatives that will keep children in school feeling safe, and involves a lot of agencies who may be useful for the improving attendance agenda. It is crucial to involve a wide variety of agencies, including bodies like the police, who may be in a position to identify children with problematic absences from school and raise the issue;

u)   a general increase in anxiety is part of the reason for absenteeism, and in such cases sometimes the relationship between the parent and the school can become strained. Family Support Workers are well-placed to act as intermediaries and find solutions adapted to the individual needs of the child.