There is an idea around the social contract, or unspoken agreement that parents will send pupils to school in return for safeguarding and quality education.. This has now faltered. We’re even seeing attendance fall in organisations outside of schools, like in Brownies and Scouts. There’s a growing number of parents who no longer view physical attendance as necessary, or even desirable.. We also know that parents underestimate both how much school their children are missing and the long time effects this has on attainment. So how can we tackle this challenge?
Contextualising data
One of the things that we found from a substantial randomised control study in America, was that the nature of the communication with parents is really important. If you tell a parent that their child has a 90 or 95% attendance, that actually sounds quite good from the point of view of a test result. And equally, stating that 90% attendance is terrible, without contextual explanation, can be an ineffective way of communicating with parents. Alternatively, talking about it in terms of the number of days missed and in terms of the impact that might have on their attainment can achieve greater understanding and buy-in from parents. You can also offer a comparison of attendance statistics to the school’s average, which has shown to be reasonably effective. When trials have been run in the US, they’ve resulted in around a 10% improvement in attendance.
Tone
Regarding the tone, I think one of the important things that came out of the US study that we’re now trying to replicate in the UK is that you should be supporting, rather than chastising parents. Schools should be finding opportunities to tell parents that they can take a role in supporting improved attendance and attainment , adopting more of an asset based, rather than deficit based approach in which parents are viewed as a source of the problem, rather than a solution.. Parents are partners in this challenge but too often I think they feel a little bit under attack.
Face-to-face
I think those things that can’t be solved by technology are the relationship building that you do from the outset. Another is to avoid over-communicating with unconsidered messages, that can be quite alienating.
There’s resource constraints to this, but when I worked in a school, we used to do home visits to every parent before their child joined. Another, more feasible, things we did, was we brought parents together in a social space in the school. Raj Chetty carried out some influential work looking at social capital and the benefits to social mobility that can be gained by bringing people together and building powerful social networks, particularly people from across different socioeconomic backgrounds.. If schools can find a way to bring parents together in a structured way and allow them to communicate in a space and meet, I think that’s a really important thing.
Don’t over communicate
Another is to avoid over-communicating with unconsidered messages, that can be quite alienating. You’re potentially going to lose people quite quickly if your messages are too long-winded. So keep things nice and punchy. I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to the frequency question, but I think that whatever it is, that must be part of a strategy. You must have a way of measuring the frequency of messages and can therefore make a judgement on whether it’s too much.
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