How a ‘carrot and stick’ approach can boost school attendance

Annmarie Wilson

Since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, schools across Wales have faced challenging issues around pupil attendance.

Many children who spent weeks at a time at home during the various lockdowns are still struggling to adapt to the routines of regular schooling.

Their formative years were disrupted to such an extent that many didn’t build up the resilience they needed, and as such, schools have seen an increase in the number of pupils presenting with anxiety and other mental health issues that lead to school avoidance.

And, as more parents now work from home, some have found it easier to keep slightly ill children home with them, instead of sending them to school like they would have previously.

Attendance figures

Together, these factors have hit national school attendance figures. The average attendance for the 2023/24 academic year in Wales was 90.5%, down from 94.3% in 2018/19 – a fall of 3.8 percentage points. The figure is even worse for pupils eligible for free school meals, with average attendance in 2023/24 at 84.8%, down 6.5 percentage points since 2018/19.

The simple fact is that if children aren’t attending school, they aren’t learning, and the impact on those who are disadvantaged is even more pronounced.

So, what can schools do about this persistent problem? At Mary Immaculate High School, we’ve taken a dual approach to the issue of attendance, with a series of firm actions balanced by positive incentives, which together have had a huge impact on our figures.

We’ve become better at spotting problems sooner. We do a lot of cross-cluster work with our partner primaries to identify any concerns with pupils’ attendance before they come to us. Our teachers closely monitoring attendance trends among pupils and identify any issues around absenteeism or lateness that might be a cause for concern.

Support

The first step in the process is to invite parents in for a meeting, remind them of their legal responsibilities and see what support we can put in place for their child. We then put an individual attendance plan in place, and if additional support is needed, we can refer them to the education welfare service.

We’ve also tightened up a lot of our procedures to ensure they are more robust. For example, we issue more fixed penalty notices for unauthorised holidays during term time and for persistent lateness.

With these firm actions we help parents and pupils understand the importance of regular attendance. But we also want pupils to enjoy being in school and to want to attend regularly, which is why we’ve implemented a school-wide competition with rewards for high attendance.

Each term we run two competitions – one for years 7,8 and 9, and one for years 10 and 11. The year groups are putted against each other to see who has the highest attendance at the end of the term, and the winner gets a prize.

We’ve run it since September 2024, and in the autumn term, years 7 and 10 won. So, before Christmas we took 180 year 7 pupils to the cinema to see a screening of Home Alone and held a fun day for year 10, with activities in school including an inflatable assault course and silent disco.

Fun days

The fun day was so popular we’ve since decided to hold back-to-back fun days for the winning year groups at the end of this term. Overall, the competition has created a real buzz of excitement around the school, bringing pupils in each year group closer together as they encourage each other to attend regularly.

This “carrot and stick” approach is already paying dividends, with our overall attendance increasing year on year. Pre-pandemic, we were averaging 92-93% attendance, but this dropped to 87% in 2022/23. In the last academic year this increased to 88.7%, and so far this year we are at 90.8%.

We know there’s still a long way to go, but with the positive atmosphere generated by the competition and the seriousness with which we take absenteeism, we are optimistic we can reach our pre-pandemic attendance figures again.

There’s no one solution for the attendance issues facing education in Wales, but by employing a balance of incentives and consequences, schools can at least start to engage pupils and their parents and make improving attendance a joint effort.

Annmarie Wilson is Deputy Head at Mary Immaculate High School in Cardiff.