Summary
Are you struggling with attendance challenges in your school?
Attendance plays a crucial role in a student's academic success and overall well-being. But what strategies can you implement to address attendance issues effectively?
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, we tackle the topic of attendance head-on, sharing with you 6 areas that fuel school avoidance and explaining what you can do to help your pupils overcome them.
Important links:
Click here to hear episode 76 - Support Strategies For Pupils With Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) with Jerricah Holder
Get our FREE SEND Behaviour Handbook: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook
Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources.php
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Show notes / transcription
Emma Shackleton
Want to improve attendance in your school? Perfect. Because we're going to share the 6 areas that fuel school avoidance and nonattendance and explain what to do to help your students overcome them.
Simon Currigan
Welcome to the School Behavior Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan. My co host is Emma Shackleton, and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents and of course, students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success. We're gonna share the tried and tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole school strategy, and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world. So you'll get to hear the latest evidence based strategies before anyone else. This is the School behaviour secrets podcast. Hi there.
My name's Simon Currigan, and welcome to another episode of school behaviour secrets. I used to get a lot of c pluses on my school reports, and the teachers would always say things like some ability could do better. And this podcast, it's a continuation of that, really. I'm joined here today by my cohost, Emma Shackleton. Hi, Emma.
Emma Shackleton
Hi, Simon. Have you got a question for me today?
Simon Currigan
You know it. Go on then. Can you tell me about a time that you forgot to turn up for something, and what excuse did you give?
Emma Shackleton
Well, I didn't really forget, but recently I was supposed to go to somebody's party, and I didn't go because I changed my mind at the last minute, and I just didn't want to.
Simon Currigan
Oh.
Emma Shackleton
I know. I gave the excuse that I was ill, which is a pretty poor excuse, really. I can't think of any other examples.
Have you got a good one, Simon?
Simon Currigan
I've got one recently. I was supposed to speak at a conference, and in my head, if you book me to a conference, this isn't what I normally do when I'm speaking. Right! In my head, the conference was absolutely on a Thursday, and I put it on a Thursday in my calendar. Then what happens at a conference is often the organisers will send out some emails and say, could you publicise that, you know, remind people about the conference on social media? And they'll they'll give you a little bit of sort of text to copy and paste a view to personalise. So I went on onto the social media on the Monday, and I was kind of, like, copying and pasting and just making some alterations.
And it said that the conference was actually on a Wednesday, and I was like, no. This isn't right. And I looked at the date, and the Wednesday was the date they'd given. And I'd put it down on the wrong date in my diary. And if it wasn't for the fact that I got that email through at the last moment, I think it have been very embarrassing. But if you book me to speak at your event, that's not normal. I just wanna I just wanna emphasise that.
Emma Shackleton
And now you know that if Simon doesn't turn up, he will tell you that it was a scheduling error.
Simon Currigan
A scheduling error. Yeah. Book Emma. Book Emma.
That's probably better.
Emma Shackleton
Go on then. How is it linked to today's episode?
Simon Currigan
Well, today, we're giving you 6 key areas to focus on to improve the attendance of absentee pupils, you know, those kids who are reluctant to come to school. And it's not anything to do with diarising dates. I think when you look at schools, what's interesting is when you look at non attendance and the percentages for non attendance, actually, most of the non attendance actually comes from a very small number of pupils or families who persistently non attend. So the big work about improving attendance rates isn't really to do with whole school stuff. It's to do with individual pupils and families. So what we're gonna focus on today isn't really about attendance in general. This is about improving the attendance of those persistent individual non attending pupils.
Emma Shackleton
Sounds good. And by the way, if you're listening to our podcast and you'd like to support us, the easiest way, and it doesn't cost any money, is to simply share it with your friends. Sharing the podcast really helps the show to grow. And if you think about it, it was probably from someone sharing it with you on social media or a word-of-mouth recommendation that you find out about us too. To share the podcast, all you've got to do is open your podcast app and hit the share button, and you can send a direct link in Messenger, by text, or WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever, or just share it with your feed on social media. And while you've got your podcast app open, remember to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss another episode.
Simon Currigan
That said, it's time to take a pin, gently warm it over a flame, look closely in the mirror, bring it closer to our face, and lance that monstrous carbuncle that is behaviour. So I think we should think about why attendance is important first and have a look at a little bit of research. The DFE released data that showed the pupils with the best attendance also have the best attainment in school at the age of 11, and persistently absent pupils were half as likely to achieve the expected standard in reading, writing, and maths. And only 2.5% of persistently absent pupils made the top grades compared to almost 22% of pupils with no missed sessions, which shows there is a clear link between attendance and attainment, you know, progress in terms of their academic learning, which makes sense. If you're not in school, you're not doing the learning, which means you aren't gonna get the results. And the same reads through to the end of secondary. Pupils with the best attendance also have the highest attainment at key stage 4.
With high absence pupils simply not doing as well in their GCSEs. And there was a really interesting study in the US back in 2007 that found kids who had high absenteeism in kindergarten. That was a predictor of poor outcomes in 1st grade. And then you could track those children having persistent difficulties through subsequent years. It's almost as if those habits, you know, kicked in early and that had poor outcomes over time. And that study also found that the lower the family income, the more likely the child was to miss school. Another interesting piece of research about this before we actually move on to the strategies, researchers from Swansea, Cardiff, and Cambridge Universities and NHS Wales also found that young people with a neurodevelopmental disorder or a mental health disorder or self harmed were much more likely to miss school than their peers.
Although it sounds like common sense, though, that behaviour and attendance would also be directly linked in the way they are for behaviour and attainment, when you look at the research, the evidence is actually much less clear. A really interesting study in 1996 in the UK looked at adults with criminal convictions. And what the researchers tried to do was find common factors that those offenders shared in their earlier lives so we could track back and do something early in children's lives so they don't become offenders in the future. It was a big study that looked at lots of different causes or predictors. And what they found in the evidence was the key predictors were things like having a parent who'd been in jail, being part of a large family, low ability or low attainment in school, and parenting factors such as poor parental supervision. The researchers did collect data on school attendance, but they found in that study that by itself, it wasn't a predictor of offending behaviour in the future. So that said, I think if children aren't in school, they can't learn and make the best of their potential.
They're going to lose out on social development with their peers or become disconnected from their friends altogether. And once they're persistently absent, they lose the habit of coming into school or they develop an anxiety about coming into class, and then it is really hard to get back in. So let's look at what we can actually do to help them. We've got 6 areas that drive most nonattendance, and they fit into the handy acronym, the handy framework, Raided. Emma, do you wanna kick off with what Raided stands for?
Emma Shackleton
Yes. So Raided, r a I d e d, and the R is for relationships. So when we talk about relationships, we mean relationships with their friends and their peers and relationships with their teachers. One of the key factors for high absenteeism is when children feel like relationships have broken down. So maybe they've been getting into trouble. Maybe the teacher's been having to correct them, and they perceive that as the teacher doesn't like them anymore. Or maybe they've had falling out with their peer groups, and they feel like they're not part of a group or that friendships have changed and moved on.
Maybe they're feeling left out. It's really tricky for some kids to come to school if they feel like they haven't got solid friendships, or they feel like the teachers don't like them. So it's important to think about relationships as the building block for good attendance. Do children feel like they are being kept in mind if they've had a short period of absence? Maybe when children have had an illness from school, the temptation is for them to feel that they've been forgotten, that the class have moved on without them, the learning's moved on, they won't know what to do when they go back, And that can make it really, really tricky to just step back into school. They might be worried about what their friends will say to them. They might be worried about awkward questions, or maybe they'll be worried that their best friend has got a new best friend now.
So they feel like relationships have broken down. So in the acronym, raidered, r stands for relationships.
Simon Currigan
And it implies that what we're gonna have to do is how do we reconnect those children with their peer group group or with the teacher so they do feel more comfortable coming into class, and that might be a piece of really specific structured work. A in rated stands for anxiety. And we've already done podcasts in the past about EBSA, which is emotionally based school avoidance. And it's really interesting how the terminology around this is changing. So in the past, we would have talked about truancy or school refusal, which kind of like labels the child as making a decision that they don't want to come into school. It's almost as if they're just being stubborn or willful. They just don't wanna do it.
But actually when you dig down into it, children who don't come into school often have this deep seated anxiety. They have these worries. And it's not that they're refusing. The you're getting emotionally driven behavior, which seeks them to avoid being in a situation in which they find threatened or uncomfortable or worrying or they feel like they can't succeed. And when you get an anxiety like that, obviously, the thing you're gonna do is to seek to avoid being in that situation where you might be failing or threatened. So what we need to really do is dig down through conversations with the child about what is actually causing that anxiety. What are the seeds of that anxiety?
And the difficult thing is, especially with younger children, they might not know for themselves. They might not be able to verbalise it, which is why it's also really important. We talk to parents because they might have some inside knowledge about how the child perceives school so then we can put in place a plan to help them in a graduated, planned way overcome that anxiety or at least manage that anxiety because we never really get rid of our anxieties, you know, in completion. What we do is we learn strategies for managing and minimising anxiety.
Emma Shackleton
I think that's a good point about anxiety actually, Simon, because we mustn't forget that when people feel anxious, the anxiety manifests in real physical bodily sensations. So children who feel anxious will get tummy aches, headaches, leg aches, backaches, earaches, And when they feel painful sensations, they can then start to feel anxious about the pain and and get worried that they're poorly as well. So it becomes into a vicious cycle, doesn't it? Yeah. So definitely talking through with them about how that is normal, helping them to locate where they feel anxiety in their body, and helping them to overcome the difficult thing and come out the other side is really crucial here. Because as you said, the anxiety leads them to avoid school, which reinforces their belief that, you know, school's not for them or their friends don't like them or the teacher doesn't like them.
Simon Currigan
And if you want to know more about EDSA and the specific strategies you can use to help children overcome emotionally based school anxiety, head back to episode 76 with Jerrica Holder.
Emma Shackleton
Okay. So in our attendance acronym, Raided, r was for relationships, a for anxiety, I stands for identity. And what we mean by identity is, what does someone with my life history, what does my family, what do my community, what do my friendships, what's my lived experience and my expectations for life in a situation like this? When I don't want to go to school or I hate a lesson or I feel isolated from my peers, what do I do? And family culture plays a huge role in this. The way that we see ourselves, the way that we notice and observe our family members and our communities responding to situations will have a huge influence on how we also respond to that situation. Thinking back to when we were talking about EBSA earlier, lots of families that I've worked with where the child is feeling unable to come to school because they are overwhelmed with emotions, many of the adults in those families will often say, yeah, I didn't go to school very much when I was little, or, you know, mom will say, I missed a lot of school.
Or dad will say, yeah, I got excluded from school. So if that's the child's lived experience that the people close to them, siblings as well, if a sibling is not attending school, that makes it doubly difficult for that child to come in. Because from their perspective, their sibling isn't coming into school. They're spending time at home or doing other things. So why can't they? So the family culture plays a huge role in the child's identifying as a school refuser or a school avoider or, you know, what am I? Am I someone who goes to school, or am I someone who it doesn't matter if I don't go to school?
Simon Currigan
Yeah. It's amazing how so much of our identity comes from three things. The stories I tell myself about my life, the stories other people tell me about my life, and the actions I've taken in the past, and, you know, unpicking that can be a really important building block of improving attendance. So d in our rated acronym, that stands for direction. And I think this is a really interesting way to view nonattendance because the assumption sometimes is to say, well, look. The child doesn't want to be in school. And we need to think about, well, actually, are they being pushed away from school, or are they being pulled towards home?
You could have the same behaviour nonattendance that is actually being fueled by a different reason. So it might well be that the child's got anxiety and they don't want to be in school. So school is kind of pushing them away from attendance, and then you get kind of anxiety and identity of things we've already spoken about. However, there is another possibility, and that's not that they don't want to be in school, but, actually, are they being pulled towards home? Right? Are they worried about something that's happening in the home? Is there potentially domestic violence, and they're worried about whether mom's okay.
Is dad hitting mom? Is mom safe? There might be issues around family breakdown, and mom and dad are arguing all the time, and they're worried that when they get home tonight, either mom or dad won't be there. Are they worried about a family member who is significantly ill, or has there been a bereavement in the family recently, and they're concerned, irrationally, but concerned that another one of their family members might die or they need nurture, from a family member to cope with the feelings around that loss. All of those are factors that have nothing to do with school. So if we come with the assumption that there is something wrong with school, then actually we might miss these other factors. It's not about school avoidance.
It's about a need to be at home to check on something or resolve an emotional uncertainty.
Emma Shackleton
Okay. And having said that, e is for environment. So e is looking at what can we do differently at school. So instead of expecting that the child will change and then slot back into school, which has stayed exactly the same as when they started feeling anxious about it, we're looking at how can we equip the child, but also what adaptations can we make to the environment. So recently I was supporting a school and they'd got a little boy in reception who was really struggling to separate from mom in the morning. He kept saying he'd got tummy ache, he was crying, he was hanging on to mom, he didn't want to come in. And after quite a lot of digging by the teachers, they found out that he was frightened of the noise of the hand dryer in the toilets.
And that goes off many times a day. And every time the hand dryer was activated and there was that big noise, that was frightening for him, and that was triggering that sense of fear and him wanting to run away. So, of course, he didn't want to come into school because he felt frightened, and he was associating school with those horrible feelings of being frightened. So once the teacher had established that this was one of the reasons he didn't want to come in, they did a really simple thing. They turned the hand dryer off. So actually nobody could use it anymore. Now that was a bit of a faff, and they had to have paper towels.
But over time, it meant that this little boy could come back into school and could cope with the environment that he was in. Now, the next thing that they did, which was very clever, it took a long time, but over the course of his year in the reception class, they gradually then started using social stories, using gradual exposure. They started to be able to switch the hand dryer back on, and they started to teach him not to be frightened of that sound. And once he eventually understood that he wasn't under threat, he wasn't gonna be harmed by hearing that noise. He did learn to cope then with the hand dryer. So that's a very specific example of where the school made a simple adaptation to the environment, which meant that the child was then able to cope in that environment. So e is for environment.
Simon Currigan
And the last letter of our RAIDED framework is d for a disconnection. Has the student lost the value of education to them in their lives? Do they need to connect education to their own aspirations, their own dreams and values? Do they see the point of being in school and learning? I think what we need to do here, a lot of children feel like their learning isn't connected to something purposeful or meaningful, and that means it doesn't have a relevance to them. And this doesn't have to be done through big kind of like I have a dream, Martin Luther King style speeches, you know, creating a grand vision. But actually understanding is what I'm learning today relevant, or is it gonna move me towards goal?
However small, when I used to teach in primary schools, there were a couple of lessons during the week, and I'm thinking especially of things like handwriting or spelling, that if they're taught in isolation can actually seem irrelevant or boring or pointless. So what we used to do at the start of the week, we would put up for all of the English work, we put up a massive mind map, and we'd talk through what we were gonna do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, then how all these constituent parts were gonna build up to a piece of work on Friday. So if we're doing some work on handwriting, we'd say, well, on Friday, we're gonna do a piece of work that's gonna go on display, and you are going to need to be able to do this join in a certain way, and people are going to be looking at it. And now that work has purpose. It's only a small thing. It's not a massive thing, but it's got purpose. Or if it's about spelling and learning a certain phonics combination, then in the work we're doing as we're building up throughout the week, you're gonna meet lots and lots of these phonic blends in your reading, and you're gonna need to use them in your writing throughout the week.
And now learning that has much more purpose. So d is for disconnection. If the child or the student has lost the value of education to them, then we're gonna need to reconnect them so they feel motivated to come in and they see the point and value of school.
Emma Shackleton
Okay. So our rated acronym was R for relationships.
Simon Currigan
A for anxiety.
Emma Shackleton
I for identity.
Simon Currigan
D for direction.
Emma Shackleton
E for environment.
Simon Currigan
And D for disconnection. And, obviously, there are other factors that can drive nonattendance. Every child is an individual, but these are the key ones that you'll probably find cover 85% of cases.
Emma Shackleton
And if you found today's helpful or useful, please do leave us a review as this prompts the algorithm to share the show with other teachers, school leaders, and parents who might also find the information helpful. It's like putting some good karma out there.
Simon Currigan
What's more, leaving a review will make you feel as happy as an Eastern European meerkat who threw a bizarre set of circumstances and business deals that have never been fully explained or subjected to the slightest journalistic scrutiny, started a nationwide insurance company, and became a mansion dwelling billionaire as a result. Get in!
Emma Shackleton
We hope you have a brilliant week and look forward to seeing you next time on School Behaviour Secrets. Bye for now.
Simon Currigan
Bye.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
