When I became lead for disadvantaged pupils I very quickly realised that one of the greatest battles I would face would be improving attendance. Now if you think about this for a second ..... DP’s have generally more challenging and chaotic homelives compared to their wealthy counterparts in school. Pupils who qualify for Pupil Premium are very often from areas where there are severe pockets of deprivation and where unemployment soars. You can also be faced with low aspiration and sometimes parents may have a negative stigma of school that has been derived from a bad experience of education themselves. All these additional turbulence factors are inevitably going to impact on attendance. With this in mind an effective attendance strategy for DP’s must target the families as well as the pupils. There has got to be something in it for them!
Some time ago I read a blog by Stephen Tierney @leadinglearner which was about ‘nudging better attendance’. For anyone who has not read the blog I highly recommend it and the link is here -
Now the principle is simple..... send out targeted postcards for attendance that have a monetary reward for the family if a certain threshold is met.
What I did was to offer the chance to win £60 of high street vouchers for the family if pupils attendance was above 97.5%. If a child achieved this then the family would be placed into the prize draw.
For pupils who were persistly absent I lowered the threshold to 95% in half term 1 (as they had more ground to make up) but made it clear this would rise in half term 2.
Each week I text out positive messages and facts about attendance and ran a workshop for families who were having the most detrimental effect.
Impact so far .....
Our DP attendance in half term 1 in 2016 was 88% and now in 2017 it is 94.6%. Persistent abscence also has reduced considerably for the cohort.
This initiative has cost £120 of PP spend and yielded 6% improvement in one half term. Incredible!
The postcards used are shared below. If anyone wants the adaptable PowerPoint versions let me know.
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