Schools are turning to innovative techniques to entice children back into the classroom, as school leaders warn that high levels of absence will become “generational” unless urgently tackled.
Therapy dogs, prize vouchers, wellness sessions, taxi rides and shepherd’s huts are being put to use by schools in England and Wales seeking to draw “anxious avoiders” to regularly attend.
One of the most ambitious efforts is at Mary Immaculate high school on the outskirts of Cardiff, which this summer opened a £1.7m facility, the Churchill wellness centre, with funding from Cardiff council.
“It’s got lamps and rugs, it’s a lovely open space. It doesn’t look like a school,” said Nadia Yassien, who runs the Bridge, the school’s pastoral support programme within the centre that works with 200 of the school’s 900 pupils.
With no alternative provision places available nearby, the centre has become a crucial venue to help children Yassien calls “anxious avoiders” come for lessons.
“We know it is working. Pupils who had really low attendance are coming in regularly and on time and happy – and that’s key because they are not going to learn if they hate the place.”
After a steep fall in attendance after Covid, Yassien said Mary Immaculate’s rates were now above the national average for schools in Wales.
Some of the improvement is thanks to Teddy, the labradoodle that has become a school celebrity when accompanying a therapist on her visits to the centre.
“The children just love the dog – she does sessions with pupils one to one, and they absolutely love it. They take Teddy for a walk, and then they speak to [the therapist] and tell her what’s going on, and then she can talk to us and tell us if they need further support,” Yassien said.
England and Wales have seen attendance rates remain stubbornly lower than pre-pandemic. The most recent statistics for England showed 150,000 “severely absent” children missing 50% or more of school sessions last year.
While awards for good attendance have long been used by schools, some are now ramping up efforts with weekly vouchers and prize draws.
Southmere primary academy in Bradford offers an escalating series of rewards, including £20 vouchers for classes with 100% attendance. Pupils with perfect records at the end of the year go into a draw to win a new bike.
Last year Ellesmere Park high school in Salford offered a week of prize draws of £50 vouchers for pupils arriving on time, rising to £80 on Friday, traditionally the worst day for attendance.
But school leaders say the most severely absent pupils require more than prizes.
Robert Bell, the head of Evolve in Sunderland for alternative provision for students in the Consilium academies chain, starts each day with a 30 minute “fit to learn” period to discuss each student’s wellbeing.
“We know that there’s potential turbulence that a student might have experienced and I don’t want that to influence the rest of their day. Students might come in with anxieties that they need to talk about, and if they have those things hanging over them then they are going to struggle,” Bell said.
The result has been a 79% improvement in attendance but Bell thinks the problem will not get better without talking more about mental health.
“Sometimes it’s generational, and parents have a diminished idea of what education is and the support the education system has. So we open our doors, three times a year, and have mental health professionals come in, so mum and dad, grandpa, grandma, sister and brother, can sit alongside them and the student and our teachers. Those are some of the most powerful days I’ve ever had in education,” Bell said.
Kevin Buchanan, the head of EdStart Schools, which runs independent alternative provision sites in Greater Manchester and Wirral, said he is seeing students who have not had formal education for up to two years.
“We have certainly seen an uptick in referrals of young people who’ve been out of education for a long period of time and we’re also seeing an uptick in referrals of students who have been educated at home but who are now coming back into the system,” Buchanan said.
EdStart’s approach is to examine the barriers each child faces and plan to overcome them. For one child whose parents struggled to get her ready, staff phoned daily at 7.30am to check, with a taxi booked to pick her up at 8.15am, until she settled into a routine.
“We’ll notice that, for some young people with poor attendance, it’s second or third generation. It’s like, ‘Well my gran never went to school, my mum didn’t go to school.’ So we say that attendance is not just a whole-school approach, it’s a whole-family approach,” Buchanan said.
David Williams, director of inclusion at the Park academies trust (TPAT) in Swindon, said he feared today’s absences could also become entrenched. “It’s generational – if we have children who don’t go to school then their children won’t,” he said.
Frustrated by the lack of specialist support after the pandemic, TPAT opened its own “school of solutions” for students. “It’s based on the personal knowledge of where a child’s path might lead if we don’t boldly step in,” said Gemma Piper, TPAT’s chief executive.
One success has been the trust’s use of two oak shepherd’s huts, after Williams spotted one in a garden centre.
“I was increasingly conscious that we have children who find it really difficult to walk through the gate of a large, 1,500-pupil secondary school,” Williams said.
But the huts have been a solution: “We have positioned them by the school gates and they were originally used to get children into school in the first place, they’re warm and clean and they don’t look like school.
“There are parents who had really struggled at school themselves and are really anxious and who you can’t get into the main building – but you can get them into a shepherd’s hut.”