Attendance in the New Academic Year: Why Early Visibility Matters
September is a natural reset point for schools.
New timetables begin, pupils return after the summer break, routines are re-established, and staff teams start the new academic year with fresh priorities. But one issue remains high on the agenda for schools and MATs across England: attendance.
The Department for Education continues to provide guidance and resources to help schools communicate with parents and carers about attendance, alongside statutory guidance on working together to improve school attendance.
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/communicating-with-parents-about-school-attendance
Attendance is not just a pastoral issue. It affects attainment, safeguarding, funding, staff workload, parental relationships, and school improvement planning.
For MATs, it also creates a visibility challenge.
A single school may be able to monitor individual pupils closely through local systems and staff knowledge. But across multiple schools, trust leaders need a wider picture. They need to know where attendance is improving, where persistent absence remains a concern, where interventions are working, and where additional support may be needed.
Why September matters
Attendance habits can form quickly.
If pupils begin the academic year with irregular attendance, those patterns can become harder to reverse later. This is why early visibility is so important. Schools need to identify concerns before they become embedded.
The start of the year is also when communication with parents matters most. Families need clear expectations around attendance, illness, punctuality, holidays, and the support available if barriers exist.
But communication alone is not enough.
Schools also need reliable systems behind the scenes. They need to track concerns, document interventions, monitor patterns, and ensure staff have access to the right information at the right time.
Without this, attendance management can become reactive.
A pupil may only receive support once absence has already escalated. A school may not spot a trend until the end of term. A trust may not realise that one school needs additional help until performance data is reviewed much later.
The MAT-level challenge
For MATs, attendance oversight is about more than checking headline percentages.
Trust leaders need to understand the story behind the numbers.
For example, two schools may have similar attendance rates but very different challenges. One may be dealing with persistent absence among a small group of pupils. Another may have wider low-level absence across several year groups. A third may be affected by transport, SEND needs, safeguarding concerns, or parental engagement issues.
The response required will not be the same in every case.
This is where better reporting and clearer processes make a difference. Trust leaders need consistent data, but they also need context. They need to see where interventions have been recorded, whether actions are being followed up, and whether schools are receiving the right operational support.
Attendance also connects with other areas of school management. Poor attendance may increase safeguarding concerns. It may affect behaviour and curriculum planning. It may require additional communication with parents. It may create workload for admin and pastoral teams. In some cases, it may also link to pupils with medical needs, SEND needs, or wider family support requirements.
This makes attendance a whole-school and trust-wide issue.
Where stronger systems help
Schools already work extremely hard to improve attendance. The challenge is often not effort. It is visibility, consistency, and capacity.
A centralised approach can help schools and MATs by making it easier to:
Track interventions
Monitor actions and follow-ups
Share information consistently
Identify patterns across schools
Support staff with clear processes
Evidence decisions and communications
Compare trends without relying on manual spreadsheets
For MATs, this kind of visibility can help leaders move from a reactive approach to a preventative one.
Instead of waiting for attendance to become a problem, trusts can identify early signs, support schools more quickly, and use data to target resources where they are most needed.
Final thought
Attendance improvement is not achieved through one policy, one letter, or one dashboard.
It requires consistent communication, strong relationships, reliable data, and joined-up support.
September gives schools and MATs an important opportunity to reset expectations and build strong habits from the beginning of the year.
The trusts that make the best progress will be those that can see the full picture early... and act before small concerns become bigger challenges.
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