Bryan Slater Director of Education	Distribution
	TO ALL HEADTEACHER AND CHAIRS OF GOVERNORS OF ALL NORFOLK SCHOOLS Excluding SPECIAL SCHOOLS

This document needs your action as detailed below:

ACTION	Title	Improving School Attendance and Tackling Truancy
	Summary of contents	Summary guidance from DfES relating to LEA absence targets and schools targets through to 2008
	Associated documents	Attendance data 2003/4, FSM based percentage absence target 2008 – to be provided by your RDA
	Date	18^th October 2004
	Summary of action required	Representative to attend a briefing meeting. Each school to: · Prepare to set attendance targets · Set first target 2005/2006 · Set trajectory of targets through to 2007/2008
	To be completed by	End of Autumn Term each year and through to 2008 school to set absence targets
	LEA Contact	Terry Cook Val Creasy	(	01603-433276 01603-223528
	E-mail address	terry.cook@norfolk.gov.uk val.creasy@norfolk.gov.uk
	Norfolk Self Review reference	2. How well are pupils' attitudes, behaviour and other personal qualities, including attendance, developed?
	Document reference	MI 200-04

We recently received from the DfES a letter outlining the Government’s commitment to improve school attendance. It highlighted the important relationship that attendance has with pupil attainment and raising school standards. Included in this letter were details about the LEA absence targets and the process for agreeing targets with individual schools within the Authority.

In summary the guidance on school attendance included the following:

a) a new public service agreement (PSA) target to be achieved by 2007/8. To arrive at that target the distribution of absence rates for primary and secondary schools in different Free School Meals (FSM) groupings (quintiles) in 2002/03 was assessed. It is assumed that every school with an absence rate above the 2002/03 median for its FSM quintile should be capable of achieving that median rate by 2008, while schools below the median rate should at least maintain current levels of performance.

b) school attendance needs to be treated as an important local priority and a statement that makes “school attendance a greater priority, setting it at the heart of school standards and the Every Child Matters agenda”

c) a need for a focus on “those schools which have consistently higher levels of absence”

d) the correlation between FSMs and absence

e) an expectation that LEA’s will focus resources on targeted schools

f) support from the DfES to identified LEAs with 7 or more secondary schools whose absence level is 20% or more above the relevant median

g) a requirement for LEA’s to agree an attendance target with every school for a 3 year period

h) a requirement for LEA’s to set agreed targets with the schools whose absence level is above the national median for their FSM quintile that are “ambitious and achievable”

i) the LEA to provide well co-ordinated and integrated challenge and support as part of the broader school improvement agenda

j) the LEA to ensure they have the full range of sanctions at their disposal to tackle poor school attendance and that they follow effective practice

k) an expectation that LEA’s will monitor attendance each half term, and more regularly for schools with higher levels of absence

l) the DfES will require schools to provide termly data direct to them in addition to their annual data return.

Based upon the above criteria, it has been suggested by the DfES that Norfolk’s minimum target should be to reduce absence from 7.35% in 2002/03 to 6.33% in 2007/08. In addition we need to prioritise support initially on the twelve Norfolk secondary schools with absence rates of 20% or more above the median for their FSM quintile, for at least the past two years. Our next priority group is primary schools with absence rates of 20% or more above the median; and then all other schools (primary and secondary) with above median absence rates.

In order to support schools a series of briefing meetings will be held and a letter will be sent to you in the very near future to advise the date and time of meeting appropriate for your school.

Meetings for priority Secondary Schools, those that the DfES has identified as having a higher level of absence, will be held during the second half of the Autumn term. For all other schools the meetings will take place during the later part of the Spring term and early in the summer term. Staff from both the Advisory Service and the Attendance Team will be present at these meetings. Information about how the data collection will be managed by the LEA is still being discussed and proposals will be shared with you at the briefing meeting.

To support the process of agreeing school targets your RDA will begin to discuss absence targets during their Autumn Term school self review / target setting meeting with you. As part of this process they will be able to provide the following data on your school, the total percentage absence for 2003/04 and your FSM based percentage absence target by 2008. Then, as from the Autumn Term 2005 they will be collecting your schools absence target for 2005/06 and discussing an achievable trajectory towards at least meeting your schools minimum level of performance by 2007/08.

If you require any further information or clarification regarding absence targets please contact either Val Creasy, Education Officer Attendance, at County Hall (01603 223528) or Terry Cook, Principal Adviser, School Performance, Monitoring and Inclusion, at the Professional Development Centre, Norwich (01603 433276).

Yours sincerely

Bryan Slater

Director of Education