Learning together

 

Making Attendance Everyone’s Business: Connect Event, 4th December 2024

We were grateful to our wonderful presenters on the day. 

At a pre-event aimed at joining up statutory services and voluntary and community sector partners several presentations were shared about Early Help (Nicola Hall), Head Start (Nicola Hunt / Andy Appleyard), Thrive at Five (Allan Brownrigg) and Vulnerable Adolescents (Nikky Henry). Our thanks to these speakers and also to Sarah Slater who has provided new information about the Health Start offer to all schools in the Borough. All services they described do, and could, impact even more on supporting good attendance in Redcar & Cleveland in future and we urge everyone to review the slides being shared here and contact them if you feel you can connect together and explore different or improved ways of working for 2025 and beyond. 

Download the presentations

Download the event notes

Watch and share the presentations with others in your organisation here! At the ‘main event’, we were joined by colleagues from the education sector, and as well as topical discussions, we enjoyed guest presentations by the following amazing speakers. You can see recordings here and we urge you to share them with colleagues in your organisation please if ever discussing practical ways to address attendance in your setting.

 

Solutions for the future

A range of thematic, system-wide and place-based solutions are emerging from all this learning together. Please see this link on the website - Solutions - for ideas that you may like to discuss and share with team members in your organisation.

Our understanding of the challenge is growing, and we now know where some of the disconnects are and opportunities for working together to achieve better outcomes Pledges of support from partners to work together are also mounting up since the Project started. 

See what different parts of the system have been saying, feeling and offering here: Perceptions and pledges 

And we’re becoming more confident about the entire purpose of this endeavour. Attendance is part of the story but not the end goal. That’s more about creating a sense of belonging for every child.

Please see the revised theory of change here to see how this has evolved since January 2023: Theory of Change

Thank you to everyone who joined us in December, the first we hope of further learning events that we can convene around the interests of this growing network and community of partners keen to prevent and reduce the levels of persistent and severe absence in Redcar and Cleveland for the long term.

 

Additional resources

Please take a look at some of these resources that capture some of the learning since 2023.

This presentation slide deck contains a review of evidence about attendance interventions by the Education Endowment Foundation and shines a light on some of the work, guidance and resources available to help make attendance everyone’s business including from the Department for Education and The Children’s Commissioner.

How do we make attendance everyones business - workshops 180123 and 280223

We also learned from multiple workshops convened in 2023 bringing together differentce people with professional and lived expertise to help us understand the causes and consequences of persistent and severe absence. We look forward to sharing more learning as it becomes available during the Project.

Team Around Models

There are a range of past and present approaches relating to the idea of putting in place a ‘Team Around….’ a child, a family, a school/college. We want to unpick these a bit more, understand what they look like, where they work ‘best,’ why they might differ in contexts and whether these can help with more preventative approaches to persistent absence and severe absence for the future. We have started work on this discovery research by reaching out to two secondary schools in the Borough that are also involved in an Anglo American funded education Programme called ‘Achieve’. You can see the briefing paper that has been shared with these schools and how this work will evolve over the Project period. You can also see some early learning about this topic on the Solutions page of this website or by downloading this summary of views and opinions gathered from different professional services.

Making Attendance Everyone's Business Project - Team Around Models Briefing Sheet

How the Virtual School has improved attendance between 2023 and 2024 – new presentation!

We celebrated the finding that the Virtual School has improved its attendance over the past 12 months at the May 2024 solutions workshop. Our huge thanks to Jo Johnson and Jen Stewart for preparing and presenting this information under very time-limited conditions! We wanted to make sure everyone has the chance to see for themselves how the attendance rate has improved.

Virtual School presentation

Here’s what Jo and Jen have told us about the difference being made for them by being involved in this wider Making Attendance Everyone’s Business Project to inspire us all. 

“Since the beginning of the project and not just listening, but really hearing the lived experiences, the will was there for collective change. Working through the theory of change and putting into practice some of the things we have learnt along the way has already made an impact upon our school attendance for the Children in our Care. At the end of the Spring term 2024, compared with the same point last academic year, the Virtual School attendance is sitting 3% higher. This may just be the initial green shoots of progress but we hope, by the end of the academic year, this will have increased further.”
Jo Johnson, Headteacher of the Virtual School for Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council 

“The whole project has been so powerful. I think by bringing people together from a whole host of perspectives, towards a common goal, we have been able to share ideas and it’s supported us all to work more closely and listen. We are all invested and united. That’s the power.”
Jennifer Stewart, Senior Inclusion Officer for Virtual School, Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council 

 

The voluntary and community sector come together to explore their potential to make attendance their business – October 2024 

This Project is funded by Anglo American and managed by Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council