The Unity Schools Partnership Attendance Hub offers to work with schools looking to increase attendance in primary, secondary or special schools. There are schools in the trust that are achieving comparatively high attendance in both primary and secondary schools, in town, village and urban contexts. The trust has seen increases in parents choosing to educate children at home and children with emotional-based school avoidance, as well as the widespread lower attendance than pre-pandemic. The trust has not seen that there is a single approach to improving attendance, rather the importance of a whole-school approach that combines sharp procedures and consistent significant adult commitment. We see the value of rigorous, well-implemented systems, but these are all in vain unless the culture of the school is where attendance is the responsibility of every member of staff to remove all the barriers there are to children attending, and for some children there are many. Bottom line, school needs to be somewhere children want to go – where the culture is right, children do want to go.

– Tim Coulson (CEO, Unity Schools Partnership)

We are very proud that three of our schools have been nominated to host as attendance hubs:

• St Edward’s C of E Academy (Romford) as an Attendance Hub for secondary schools
• and jointly, Abbots Green Academy and Houldsworth Valley Primary Academy as an Attendance Hub for primary schools

The Trust, Unity Schools Partnership, will be liasing with both hubs to support all their member schools.

In line with our values, Unity SP will approach attendance hubs in a collaborative manner. Each of your schools have their own context and are, therefore, likely to be different in a number of ways to another school, no matter similarities such as geographical area or demographics. We do not claim to be ‘the experts’ for attendance, more that we work with our schools to find out what works in their context and offer advice, support and examples of what has worked elsewhere, in what context and why.

Our three schools were chosen, not because they don’t face the same challenges that all schools do, particularly since Covid-19 but because these schools have consistently performed above the national average for attendance and have maintained that inspite of Covid-19.

To access our resources and join our hub meetings you must register first with the DfE. They will assign you a hub.

If you are already one of our member schools. We will assign you a password to enter either our Primary Schools’ Attendance Hub or our Secondary Schools’ Attendance Hub resource area.

If you haven’t received yours, please let us know at attendancehub@unitysp.co.uk