Two issues that seem to be more of a headache than any other right now:
Attendance.
Recruitment.
You may not be directly responsible for either of them. But you will definitely suffer the impact if they’re not are going well.
This week’s highlights from the community offer you some help with both.
We - schools - Are In Beta - always learning (when we have both students and staff in the building).
This week
🔬✅ Attendance policies - what can we learn from 31 high performing schools?
💼 🔎Jobs with We Are In Beta community members.
🔬✅ Attendance policies - what can we learn from 31 high performing schools?
This week’s highlight is a brilliantly thorough piece of research by Hollie Panther, who joined the We Are In Beta team recently.
Here’s some context:
“Last year, to help find hints of good practice, we published a list of 113 schools that secured amazing improvement in attendance.
“We asked our wonderful community what questions they would ask to these schools, if they could.
“Questions raised were around communication, culture, parental engagement, monitoring, rewards and staffing.
“There was also a need to understand these schools’ approaches to different groups within the school; Persistent Absence (PA), EBSA (Emotional Based School Avoidance), and PP/FSM (Pupil Premium/Free School Meals).”
To help answer some of those questions, Hollie spent a week scouring the websites of 25 secondary schools from our earlier analysis.
Here’s what she found 👇
📝 How schools structure policies - what Hollie explores:
how she approached the problem
school selection criteria
12 observations I made about schools' attendance policies
how to read and download the 25+ policy related resources she found
🔎 5 attendance policy observations
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The full article shares 12 policy observations from the 25 policies looked at.
Here are five that might get you thinking about what your school does:
🏆10 out of 25 mentioned reward systems in their schools
😷5 schools clarified how ill a pupil who is kept off school should be
🕌14 schools mentioned authorising absence for religious observations
🗓 3 talked about children returning to school on reduced timetables
🚨5 had child protection plans that clearly focussed on safeguarding children who were missing from school
💼 Jobs with We Are In Beta community members.
Want the 14.5k+ people reading this newsletter to see your roles?
Senior leadership.
Principal - Castle Batch Primary School Academy (Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset).
Assistant Principal - Winterstoke Hundred Academy (Bristol).
National Leader for Secondary English - Academies Enterprise Trust (London).
Middle leadership.
Head of D&T - Oasis Academy South Bank (London).
Heads of Department in: Maths, Music, Art, RE - Ark Sloane (London).
Heads of Department in: MFL, Humanities - Winterstoke Hundred Academy (Bristol).
Teaching.
14 roles at the schools listed above across these subjects:
Computer Science - Winterstoke Hundred Academy.
English - Ark Sloane.
E-Sports - Winterstoke Hundred Academy.
MFL - East Barnet School, Priory Community School, Worle Community School.
Geography - East Barnet School.
Maths - East Barnet School, The King Alfred School (Somerset), Winterstoke Hundred Academy.
Science - East Barnet School, Priory Community School.
PE - Ark Sloane, Priory Community School.
Interested in these roles?
Send the people who posted them a message to find out more. But first…
On a personal note
Two conversations I’ve had with school leaders recently are fresh in my mind.
One about attendance. The other about recruitment.
Two very different topics. But both with a strikingly similar takeaway - they are everyone’s responsibility.
Attendance is not just your attendance officer’s responsibility.
Recruitment is not your HR team’s job.
You have a huge potential influence in making:
students want to come to school and
future colleagues want to join your school
The two leaders talk sense when they say: you can make them believe in your vision and make them feel like they can thrive at your school.
Both of them have been doing great work to get their teams taking a whole school approach to both objectives.
So my question for you is - how do you it?
Just reply to this email.
Will happily put you in touch with them if you’d like to hear how they’re doing it.
Thanks for reading.
@NiallAlcock and the We Are In Beta team.
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