The Attendance Matters initiative aims to get more young people back into school more often. The numbers have failed to recover since the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.
Average rates for primary school attendance in the 2024/25 academic year fell to 94.8% from the 96.7% recorded in 2020/2021.
But the Education committee’s real concern is in secondary schools where attendance has crashed from 93% to just 87.6% over the same period.
‘Although something like 80% attendance might not look that bad, 80% attendance is actually missing one day a week, or one whole year across a whole secondary school period of time,’ said Nick Hynes, director of education.
‘If you’re attending 90% of the time, that also sounds pretty good. But if you multiply that over a five-year period again, you’re missing nearly a term of school over the secondary period. So there’s a cumulative effect.’
That time missed can carry long-lasting negative impacts that extend beyond poor exam grades.
‘The obvious one is that if a child isn’t attending school, then academically their outcomes won’t look as good,’ said Mr Hynes.
‘But what we also see is that their mental health and well-being can suffer. Friendship groups which have been established in school are broken and socially, some children can feel quite isolated. There’s a whole variety of different knock-on effects.’
To tackle the issue, a school attendance working group was formed last year to develop the Attendance Matters campaign.
Comprising of head teachers, teachers, education staff and representatives from across health and social care, their key task was to do ‘a big trawl’ through published data on the topic and pre-existing school attendance campaigns from across the UK to best construct an approach that would deliver results in Guernsey.
The outcome has been the development of a co-ordinated, island-wide initiative that maintains the flexibility to allow for tailor-made messaging for each school, depending on its needs.
‘What is different about our campaign is that we’ve got a whole island collaborative approach where all of our schools will have banners outside with our attendance matters logo, but then with quite specific messages for each of those individual schools,’ said Mr Hynes.
‘Our head teachers, principals and teachers know their children best, they know their parents best. So, there’ll be a bespoke approach for each of the different settings, according to their knowledge of the school community and young people.’
Another outcome of the working group is the campaign’s central focus on raising awareness of the importance of regular attendance during the earliest stages of the school year.
‘We’ve seen from the data that the first three weeks can really set the trend about what attendance looks like for the rest of the year,’ said Mr Hynes.
‘Having a strong start at the beginning, attending every day and attending well, can really put those habits in place to continue throughout the year.’
An additional aim of the campaign will be to make sure that parents are well-supported and listened to during the ‘really stressful and difficult’ process of getting resistant children back to classes.
‘It can be quite lonely as a parent when you’re having these challenges,’ said Mr Hynes. ‘Sometimes parents don’t know where to turn. We want to try to break down those barriers and say, talk to us, we can help.
‘This really is an honest effort to engage with parents. This isn’t about pointing fingers. Attendance isn’t just a parent issue, it’s not just a school issue, it’s a community issue. And by working collectively across the community together, we can have an impact on that.’
Parents concerned about their child’s attendance will be able to seek help by contacting the campaign’s school attendance service or by visiting the campaign’s soon-to-launch website. Parents can also get in touch with family support workers, who are now in place across the island’s secondary schools.
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