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Strategies for improving attendance

Use our practical tips to help tackle poor attendance in your school. While these aren't intended to be a quick fix, you can put most of them into practice without overhauling your whole strategy.

Updated
on 2 July 2026See updates
School types: All•School phases: All•Ref: 44343
Contents
  1. Start by analysing your attendance data
  2. Focus your attention where it’s needed most
  3. Get all staff working together to promote good attendance
  4. Remind your community that good attendance is everyone's responsibility
  5. Give pupils a purpose to be in school each day
  6. Proactively manage lateness and internal truancy
  7. Consider your attendance baseline improvement expectation (ABIE)

Start by analysing your attendance data

Make sure you fully understand the situation in your school before you start taking steps to improve it. Find out how to analyse your attendance and absence data in 3 steps.

Ofsted expects you to have an informed and accurate understanding of attendance through using "detailed" data analysis to identify, anticipate, prevent, and improve poor attendance. 

This is set out in the State-funded Schools Inspection Toolkit (page 37).

You can use attendance data published on the government's view your education data service to get information about your school's picture. Take a look at the new visual heatmap tool called 'Explore your attendance patterns' for more support.

Identify and anticipate flashpoints in the school year

You should also be mindful of local and national drivers of low