Absence and attendance matter much more than admissions

It might surprise some people but, for a disadvantaged child, Brighton and Hove is one of the best places in England to go to school.

Once you account for the children our schools actually teach, they are among the top handful of areas in the country for how far they carry their poorest pupils.

A school like BACA in the north east of Brighton has in recent years been talked down but, on new evidence, is actually doing some of the very best work anywhere in England to lift the attainment of the most deprived pupils.

We should all be very proud of this and I am pleased that perceptions have been shifting rapidly.

And yet we are also, quietly, near the bottom of the whole country for one thing. Last year, Brighton and Hove had the second worst school attendance in England. Not the second worst in the south east. The second worst in England.

I did not set out to write about attendance. Like a lot of people in the city, I spent two years pulled into the argument over school admissions – who gets into which school and how.

And to form my own opinions and to try to understand the issues properly, I did what I do for a living: I got stuck into the data.

I went to the government’s open data on every school in the country and started to model what actually shapes how well a child does.

I expected the story to be about which school a child attends. It wasn’t. The same answer kept coming back and it wasn’t about admissions at all. It was about attendance.

A child who is not in the room cannot be taught – and in Brighton and Hove, too many of our children are not in the room.

How much does it matter? More than almost anything else we argue about. If every school in Brighton got its attendance up to the level of our own best-attending school – not some impossible national target, a school here that already manages it – disadvantaged children would leave with around five more GCSE grade points each.

That is a bigger prize than anything else on the table, a prize without collateral damage, a prize with real and unequivocal impact – and it is entirely ours to win.

I want to be careful here, because attendance is not a switch you flip. Children miss school for reasons that are mostly not their fault – and often not the school’s either.

The reasons include illness, anxiety, special needs that go unmet, the cost of the bus, family life under real strain.

As people who work closely on this keep reminding us, tackling absence is about far more than getting children through the gates. It is also about whether a child feels they belong once they are inside their school.

One recent study that followed 200,000 pupils found that children with a stronger sense of belonging attend more. And the slide often starts early – in the first year or two of secondary school – and it falls hardest on disadvantaged children.

Class Divide and other local campaigners have done the city a service in showing how heavily all of this bears on our poorest families.

They are right about that – and they have been right to be loud about it. Everyone in this – the campaigners, the schools, the parents, the council – wants the same thing: the best for the city’s children.

Grasping attendance means taking those barriers seriously: physical and mental health, transport, poverty, belonging. It does not mean lecturing families or blaming schools.

Which is why I think it is time to move the conversation and the policy on. The admissions argument grew out of a genuine wish to help disadvantaged children and that instinct was the right one.

But the evidence is now reasonably clear that moving children between schools does little for their results while the negative effects of the disruption and the extra travel are real.

Attendance is where that same energy would actually pay off. And it is landing now. Attendance has become a national priority.

Every school in England now shares its daily registers and it will be near the top of the agenda when the next inspection reports arrive in the autumn. Brighton and Hove has a chance to be ahead of this, not behind it.

None of this belongs to me. The data is open – the government publishes it for every school in the country – and the tools I have built are there for anyone to use and to argue with.

A colleague put it well recently: academics are most useful when they share, support and partner rather than pronounce from on high. That is the spirit I want to work in.

There is one thing we cannot yet answer – and I think we should. We know that children who live further from their school tend to miss slightly more of it and that this falls hardest on disadvantaged children in the GCSE years.

We know, too, that children who feel they belong attend more. What we cannot yet say is what happens to a child’s attendance, and their sense of belonging, when they are sent right across the city, whether by parental choice or fate, away from their friends and their neighbourhood.

It is a genuine open question – and exactly the kind that a shared, open effort could finally settle.

So here is my offer. I would like to work with the council, with our schools and with the community groups who understand these barriers best to build one shared, honest, up-to-date picture of attendance across Brighton and Hove – where it is worst, who it hits hardest and why – and to use it to get more of our children into school.

We already have some of the best schools in the country for the children who need them most.

Imagine what they could do if everyone turned up. If we get this right, the city will be a national beacon and others will look to Brighton and Hove for the very best practice.

The public talk that I gave at BHASVIC on Tuesday 21 July and the full analysis that accompanies this are available here.

Adam Dennett is Professor of Urban Analytics at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, a former state secondary school geography teacher, Brighton resident and parent.