Attendance Planning for the Year

A Sample Attendance Plan

Take a look at this sample attendance plan from the US site Attendance Works.  Although there are some differences in terminology, the basic principles behind the plan remain valid and sound for English schools.  You will also be familiar with the three-tier approach as this is similar to that often used for SEND pupils and safeguarding issues.  There is even a separate version for EYFS which you can access here.

Planning Using Known Attendance Trends 

Recent improvements in the attendance data that we have access to for the Trust mean that we can now look at trends in the annual attendance pattern.  This allows us to plan for foreseeable drops in attendance to minimise them and also to make the most of periods when we can expect attendance to be at its best.  The first graph below shows the Trust primary attendance  trend for 2016 to 2019  (ie before the pandemic) for primary pupils Y1 to Y6.  Remember, this is to illustrate the trend, so look at where the line drops or rises significantly rather than the overall figures.   The holidays may appear longer than usual, but this is because they move from year to year and schools in different areas may have different holiday dates.  

Not surprisingly the years of school closure due to the pandemic looked significant different, but this last academic year, we have a return to more normal trends, albeit with a much lower overall attendance rate.  The second graph below shows the trend last academic year and you can see a return to the usual trends but with a big drop in attendance around Xmas when Scarlet fever had a big effect.

What is clear from looking at these graphs is that we can expect the best attendance at the beginning of the academic year and then its downhill from that!  It is also clear that attendance drops significantly just before any holiday and then improves significantly in the week of returning after the holiday, but drops off quickly.  The sharpest drops over the year are in late Nov/early Dec (usually due to colds and winter vomiting virus) and also at the very end of the academic year.