Attendance: What works
Schools are increasingly worried about attendance and inclusion for several key reasons – academic, legislative and social. Would you like help with strategies schools are using to improve attendance? And how parents and communities can help?
Dates
4 June 2025 | 18 June 2025
16:00 - 17:30
Format
Online webinar
Cost per webinar
SSAT members: £185+VAT
Non-members: £225+VAT
Book both webinars to receive a 15% discount.
Tackle one of the most pressing challenges in education today: attendance. As schools face mounting pressures from significant changes to statutory guidance and as inspection focuses more closely on how schools manage absence, our webinars will equip you with the tools, strategies, and inspiration to lead in this new landscape.
Mainstream schools are increasingly at the forefront of delivering inclusive education, supporting children with diverse abilities, needs, and circumstances in the face of complex systemic barriers.
These events will provide you with:
Practical strategies:
- Reflecting on your attendance practices against the statutory guidance.
- Reviewing case studies of effective and less effective practice in managing absence.
- Reframing your existing practices in light of changing expectations about attendance.
- Refocusing your attendance efforts through evidence-informed ‘quick wins’
Explore topics such as:
- What research tells us works and doesn’t work to improve attendance.
- How to ensure “attendance is everyone’s business” in your setting.
- How to better engage families by building a positive culture around attendance.
- How to more effectively target support by better use of absence data.
Who should attend?
- SLT, school, MAT and college leaders
- CEOs
- Headteachers/Principals
- Executive Heads
- Deputy Headteachers/Vice Principals
- Assistant Headteachers /Assistant Principals
- Attendance Managers/Officers
Creating a positive culture around attendance to better engage families
Wednesday 4 June 2025, 16:00 – 17:30
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
Wednesday 18 June 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.
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.
Any questions?
Contact us or call 020 7802 2300.
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