Can Effective Family Engagement Support Improving School Attendance?

In schools across the country and beyond, it would seem that the spotlight is continuously on improving rates of attendance. We know that consistent attendance underpins academic success, but for some, there are barriers to overcome. We need to consider why some children are persistently absent and provide supports to both children and their families, to enable them to attend school on a regular basis. 

Understanding the reasons behind persistent absence 

There are numerous reasons why a young person may be persistently absent from school. These can include: 

• Physical or mental illness 

• Academic difficulties and struggling to access the curriculum 

• Bullying and relationship issues with peers 

• Unmet needs due to diagnosed or suspected special educational needs and disabilities 

• Caring responsibilities for other family members 

• Feeling that school is not relevant or important to them 

The role of schools in supporting families 

Schools play a key role in supporting families in the wider community. They offer a safe haven of help, advice, and sometimes, just a listening ear. Good relationships between parents/ carers and school staff are fundamental to a wrap-around education, where everyone is striving to create consistent experiences across home and school. 

In recent years, families have increasingly turned to schools to support them in navigating difficulties around accessing support for their children, particularly those with additional needs, often feeling like they have nowhere else to go. 

Schools across the country do a phenomenal job of 'plugging the gap' until other support is established. However, this can sometimes mean that school and family relationships understandably become focused mainly on process and bureaucracy, and perhaps not as much on shared thinking, consistency, and collaborative problem solving. 

So, can effective family engagement improve attendance? 

We think so, yes! But first we need to evaluate just how meaningful our relationships with families are now. For some parents and carers, the only relationship they may have with their child's school is because things have gone wrong in the past. 

If we started a phone call home by saying, "I'm calling to talk to you about your child's behaviour," how many of our families would assume that we were about to tell them something negative? Behaviour and attendance can easily become the only reasons that some families have interactions with their child's school. 

Instead, it's key that we involve families in all aspects of school life: the good, the challenging and, most importantly, the ways forward. With more positive relationships with families, we can develop a broader picture of our young people as individuals, to understand and support them better. 

Supporting a young person throughout their time in education is a team effort and making space within our teams for parents and carers can then create supports for understanding and addressing persistent absence, moving forward together with shared goals and aspirations.  

When schools and families are working together, children feel more understood and barriers to attendance can be reduced and hopefully, over time, eliminated. We can celebrate small steps of progress and measure the wins, rather than only focusing on the problems. 

The importance of building trust 

When we consider working with our families, trust is key. Trust and openness are the foundation for understanding the correlation in experience between home and school. 

Our schools continue to offer support and guidance to families, and building relationships with the families of our most vulnerable young people is particularly essential. We're striving for consistency. Could some of the strategies we implement in school to support understanding behaviour and de-escalation be effective at home, and vice versa? Could we see more positive improvements in absence rates, mental wellbeing, and academic outcomes if a consistent experience was created between home and school? 

How to develop better family engagement 

A joined-up approach allows us to plan for support that doesn't stop at the school gates and offers parents/ carers more strategies they can use to support their child's behaviour at home. 

We also need to be open to learning from parents. Family engagement isn't about teaching parents/ carers how to be 'better' parents; it's about developing trust, a shared language, and a cohesive approach to behaviour. We can be curious and have a puzzle-solving approach, working together instead of assuming that we already know everything there is to know already. 

We can offer more emotional safety to our young people by mirroring strategies at home and in the classroom, offering a consistent adult response, and minimising the challenges our young people face in navigating boundaries and expectations that sometimes vary between home and school. 

Some parents and carers are reluctant for their child to be at school when there are concerns that their child's needs are not being met. Openness and a focus on ways forward are key to families feeling like they are working with a school and not against it. Information shared about home experiences can also allow us to create inclusive, well-informed, child-centred individual support plans for young people with additional needs. 

Closing the gap between home and school 

Like all relationships, patience and time are key. For some parents and carers, their perceptions of school have built up over a period of time and creating new positive experiences will take time. 

When we lead with the positives, alongside lending an understanding ear, we can empower our families to feel as though they are valued as part of their child's wider support network. 

We can offer our families a broader set of strategies, and learn from them, too. For some families, it can feel like a there is a great divide between school and home. It could be that in shrinking that perceived divide, we find ourselves working together to improve school attendance.

Please let us know if you need any support with behaviour support or family engagement in your setting.