Recommendation 11

HM Government Accepted in Part

The Government welcomes the Committee’s support for our recent expansion of attendance mentors and the recognition in the evidence to the Committee of key elements of the associated model including the role of strong individual relationships with children facing barriers to attendance, and the difference that whole family support can make. The attendance mentoring programme sits alongside our more systemic work with schools and local authorities through attendance hubs and attendance advisers, the latter of whom will have offered support to every local authority in the country by the end of this academic year. In September 2023 the Department announced a further expansion of its attendance hub programme, with 14 hubs now working with 800 schools across the country. The Minister for Schools also wrote to MATs with high rates of attendance in September inviting them to set up additional hubs. The Government’s intention is to double the number of hubs by the end of the academic year, reaching up to a million children and ensuring their schools can access excellent resources and advice. The Government is cautious on the recommendation for a national roll-out of mentoring at this time, given the risk of duplication of work already being undertaken via the Supporting Families programme. The Government has invested an extra £200m in Supporting Families increasing the budget to £695m by 2024–25, reaching an additional 300,000 families facing multiple, high-cost problems. Sustained good attendance for all children in a family, using a whole family approach, is a key programme outcome. In addition, there is limited evidence on how best to apply mentoring to school absence. An EEF rapid evidence review from 2021 found there was weak evidence on effective attendance interventions, including mentoring. This was reiterated in its written evidence to the committee which stated that ‘the evidence base linking mentoring interventions and pupil attendance is limited in size and had serious methodical flaws’. The EEF recognised research was needed to understand the effectiveness of mentoring programmes in England and has launched a joint funding round in partnership with the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF), called ‘A Safe, Positive Place to Learn: Improving attendance and reducing exclusions’. The funding round was set up to find, fund and evaluate programmes and practice in England and Wales that could both keep children safe from involvement in violence and improve academic attainment by reducing absenteeism. In order to build this evidence base further, the Department has invested £2.3m to develop a 3-year pilot of attendance mentors currently being delivered by Barnardo’s. The pilot started in Middlesborough in 2022 and expanded to four additional local authorities this September to support around 1700 persistently and severely absent pupils. The Department is working with an external research organisation to evaluate fully the effectiveness and value for money of the intervention. The findings will inform future decisions on national roll out and scope of the programme. The Department recognises a case for expanding the scale of this pilot, both to ensure an even more robust evaluation, and to increase capacity in reaching children with particularly high levels of absence. The Government will consider options to expand mentoring investment to more local areas in 2024/25. Alongside this pilot, and the Supporting Families Programme, the Government is funding other programmes that support children facing absence barriers. The Department is investing over £50 million in serious violence hotspots to fund specialist support in both mainstream and Alternative Provision schools through its AP Specialist Taskforces (APST) and SAFE programmes. Children in Alternative Provision are disproportionately likely to be severely absent. The aim is to improve children’s attendance as well as behaviour, wellbeing and attainment in school with over 4,500 children reached so far. The effect of this work is being evaluated by the YEF to strengthen the evidence base for effective interventions.