The drivers behind attendance: How understanding parental engagement can be used to support attendance at school
Written by: Harriet Ratty
5 min read
Harriet Ratty, Partnerships Support Coordinator, ImpactEd, UK
The percentage of students persistently missing school in the 2021/22 academic year was considerably higher than pre-pandemic in 2018/19, at 22.5 per cent compared to 10.9 per cent (DfE, 2023). These numbers have since risen.
At ImpactEd, we support schools to measure the impact of their initiatives so that they can focus on what is working best. In response to the national challenge with attendance, we have recently launched a large-scale research project – Understanding Attendance – helping schools to track the barriers to attendance at school. In this piece, we share some of the literature that informed this project and the importance of understanding the drivers behind attendance, with a particular focus on parental engagement with a view to improving pupil attendance.
Why does this matter?
The research is clear that all settings have struggled to maintain attendance rates since COVID. In autumn 2021, Ofsted fo
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