Like many schools, we have a persistent absentee problem, but after Covid, we’ve also found that we have had more mental health issues among our children. This goes hand in hand with a mindset from parents that they can now teach the kids themselves from home. To try and solve this problem, we’ve started by trying to mend that miscommunication where parents felt we were against them, which we aren’t. We’ve got a fantastic Wellbeing Team at the school and they looked into how we can help our parents. We introduced was an open-door attitude and policy where parents can come in, discuss anything and from there we see if we can solve it and help get their kids back in school.
Once you do that with the parents, you find out little things about them and you can start to make more sense of their individual cases and why they haven’t sent their children into school. It’s all about being a nurturing school and helping them to come in and speak to us. Our Wellbeing Team is on the gate every morning speaking to the parents, dealing with those little issues that are niggling at them.
So, how does Arbor help this? Daily reporting is obviously perfect on the dashboard. We’ve got our data right there in front of us. But then when I dig deeper and I look at the persistent absentees and lates, and then also the correlating siblings, I can spot trends that I wouldn’t have before. Because we’re able to spot those patterns really obviously through Arbor, we can then do a RAG rating and get the parents in to have a meeting where needed, and see if we can signpost them to the right people.
In another wellbeing initiative, we introduced an extra week’s holiday every year for our pupils. The idea is that parents can take their children on holiday in term time, which is far cheaper. But we wanted to do this in a way that meant nobody was missing out on lesson time. The Senior Leadership Team decided to condense five training days into CPD evenings, and that way we could add an extra week of holiday where both parents and staff could get away, for less. We knew some other schools had done this in the October Half Term, whereas our school ran it in the first week of June, when they were more likely to take a holiday, and further from Christmas. We sent out newsletters, reminding parents that this is the week to take your kids on holiday, even in this country. Given that this is our first year running the initiative, we’re looking forward to seeing the effects this has on persistent absenteeism and hopefully improved attendance around the summer holidays.
Siobhan took part in our attendance panel at ArborFest. Click here to watch the panel in full.
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