THE MISSING LINK - Restoring the bond between schools and families

Recommendation: The Department for Education should create a National Parental Participation Strategy, which should create a new duty for schools and multi-academy trusts (MATs) to focus on parental participation and publish parental participation plans Trusts and schools should design these plans in consultation with parents and guardians to reflect the needs of local families As part of a broade. [...] Recommendation: The Department for Education should roll out a national programme of 2,000 attendance mentors These mentors would work with families to understand and remove the underlying barriers to school attendance A national programme would cost an estimated £80 million per year However, this must not become a longer-term replacement for proper family engagement at school level 14 The Centre. [...] Recommendation: The Department for Education should develop new metrics to track school attendance This data should examine attendance patterns at an individual and school level and should be incorporated into the attendance dashboard Recognise the value of relational work through youth clubs and services. [...] Recommendation: The Government should introduce a new Right to Sport for all secondary school pupils to unlock five hours of extracurricular activity for every pupil in secondary school in England The Right to Sport would see all pupils participate in a minimum of two hours of extracurricular sport per week, on top of PE time already scheduled on the curriculum, closing the ‘activity gap’ between. [...] Recommendation: The Department for Education should conduct a review into the effectiveness of fines and attendance prosecution to examine the conditions under which these formal mechanisms can improve attendance Recommendation: The fines for School Attendance Orders (SAOs) and attendance prosecution should be made the same value to avoid creating perverse incentives which push children out of the.