“Every interaction could be an intervention”
Dr Karen Treisman
Why We Need to Make a Distinction
Differentiating between school engagement and school attendance is fundamental to further understanding school avoidance. School avoidance is nested within ‘school attendance’, because it is currently measured using attendance tracking systems. Through the Nova programme and this toolkit, it is hoped that schools can begin to develop their own systems of recognising school avoidance before it becomes evident through School Attendance Problems (SAPs).
As mentioned earlier, it is important to get the terminology right and use the correct language for children and young people when working with school avoidance. While school engagement and attendance go hand in hand, they are separate concepts.
School avoidance support plans should always aim to improve engagement first and foremost. Attendance can improve when children, young people, and their families feel a sense of belonging and connection to the school. This is achieved through improved engagement. School engagement can be understood as a developmental process comprising student thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviours concerning their school environment and lifelong learning trajectory. The child or young person directly experiences the benefits of showing up/attending every day. We can see how a cyclical pattern emerges, where a child or young person’s sense of belonging is hampered by their attendance rates and vice versa.
A recent Department of Education Inspectorate Report 2021-2023, found that strategies to promote attendance, particularly in schools
where the attendance of children and young people is a cause for concern, may not place sufficient emphasis on the critical link between high quality, responsive, teaching and consistently good school attendance.
A key finding from the Understanding Attendance project is that children’s and young people’s sense of belonging at school has a statistically significant impact on their attendance rates. There is a growing understanding that schools also need to support learners in developing a sense of belonging, connectivity, and engagement with school and in building their resilience and ability to cope with their challenges.
Good Practice Tip: Consider instituting check-in circles at the start of you week with a class and check-out circles at the end of week, they are great for relationship-building. They can be easily done by passing a “talking and listening piece” around and asking students to tell you their energy levels between one and ten and how their weekend went/what they are looking forward to for the weekend. It helps to explain that the rule for the Talking and Listening piece is that the person holding it is doing the talking and everyone else agrees to listen to them while they have it. It also helps to answer the questions yourself first (to model it for the students).
Additional Resources
ImpactEd – UK-based Understanding Attendance Project
ImpactEd launched Understanding Attendance as a national project to help schools understand the drivers behind poor attendance in their setting. It is based in the UK and has several reports available for review.
Safe Hands Thinking Minds 7 E Model
Dr Karen Treisman has developed a resource around her 7 E Model to capture some ways of exhaling, exploring, expanding, enriching, embodying, embedding, and expressing to enrich every interaction in a school or classroom.
