Reducing Truancy

Recent guidelines have been put into place to ensure that Schools closely monitor their pupils' attendance. Ensuring Children's Right to Education: Guidance on the Legal Measures available to Secure Regular School Attendance, issued in January 2008, states that schools are legally required to take an attendance register twice a day and must show whether any absence is authorised or unauthorised. All other absences, including persistent lateness, must be treated as unauthorised. It is therefore crucial that the register is accurate and that the school has appropriate data to report and substantiate any absenteeism.

The Government has recently introduced its 2008/09 National Attendance Strategy which states that it is vital that Schools and Local Authorities have robust and effective systems in place to monitor absence and attendance.

In January 2003, the Government signed the Raising Standards and Tackling Workload: A National Agreement which began a series of improvements including reducing 25 administrative tasks for teachers, such as analysing attendance figures from registration data. EasyTrace’s E-Registration can help with these issues.

EasyTrace E-Registration enables your management team to report on time of registration and persons on/off site via your schools existing management information system. Whilst the teacher still remains responsible for ensuring that individuals register properly for classes, our solution can provide:

• Statistics on absenteeism over a required period
• Help on managing truancy by showing who is absent post registration

Attendance officers can immediately see who is absent, allowing the school to promptly follow up any on truancy in an appropriate manner.

For more information:

Teachernet.gov.uk link to www.teachernet.gov.uk
DCSF link to www.dcsf.gov.uk