TARGET – effective action on attendance

TARGET is a new attendance data presentation tool that not only helps you improve attendance, but also lets you demonstrate your improvements to OFSTED inspectors, Senior Management and Governors. As a school you know your percentage attendance, you can even name your worst absentees. But what about those pupils who are more difficult to spot and even more damaging to your attendance figures. Target is specifically designed to undertake this analysis.

TARGET has three distinct steps:

1. Visualise your SIMS data easily and quickly.

The use of electronic registration usually leads to the accumulation of a large amount of data. Working directly with your SIMS data, TARGET allows you to see all your attendance data in a way that helps you identify problem areas that would have been difficult to discover using traditional methods. TARGET helps spot problems, issues or areas of concern, such as:

• Which pupils have a significant record of "broken weeks"
• Which apparently good attendees are gradually getting worse?
• Which groups or pupils show poor attendance on particular days or are regularly allocated particular absence codes?
• What the relationships are between attendance and other factors such as free meals, gender, ethnicity, SEN etc.

Having identified individual students or groups of students with particular problems, you can begin to build an action plan and, if required, set targets and achievement dates. Each student can be given their own personal targets and targets can be set for groups. Targets can range from simple percentages to broken weeks and half day absences.

Regularly check on your targets and see immediately how the students are progressing, giving you the chance to implement timely remedial action where necessary.

- Joanne Sierzega, Solihull MBC

How can TARGET help you?

With TARGET you can:

• Direct your actions on attendance decisively towards the most appropriate pupils, families, staff and curriculum areas
• Have an unambiguous audit trail of evidence to complete your SEF, staff development and run a system of rewards and sanctions
• Build a relationship with your local authority, particularly the EWS, based on the sharing of data
• Monitor your attendance against any chosen benchmarks such as national targets or schools of a similar nature and set realistic evidence based attendance targets at individual or group levels.

For a FREE TRIAL or ordering information, please contact us on 01902 824 281 or email your request to: sales@tascsoftware.co.uk