Knowing Your Problem: Teignmouth School's Evidence-Led Approach

Knowing Your Problem: Teignmouth School's Evidence-Led Approach to Attendance

Teignmouth School has been on a mission to improve the attendance of their pupils. The school is participating in ImpactEd Evaluation's Understanding Attendance research project, which provides them with insights into the drivers impacting pupil attendance. Chris Darvill, deputy Headteacher took over as attendance lead in 2024/25, but had joined the school, alongside the current head, in 2022/23 when the school was undergoing a structural change. Teignmouth school had experienced turbulence in the preceding years, including high staff turnover and a recent 'Requires Improvement' judgement from Ofsted. The incoming team identified behaviour as an immediate priority, followed closely by attendance.

Teignmouth Community School is a smaller-than-average 11-18 secondary school on the Devon coast, with around 780 pupils. The school's pupil population is made up of 27% of pupil premium eligible students. Around 13% hold an EHCP, and approximately 51% are on SEN support. The catchment is predominantly white British.

Chris shares how he used the Understanding Attendance research project as a tool to understand the barriers behind their attendance challenges and, importantly, how once they had identified the barriers, the school could begin to address them systematically - and the results are starting to show. This academic year (2025/26) Teignmouth school is consistently tracking around one percentage point ahead of the same point last year.

Chris has a clear message for any school leader starting a similar journey: understand your problem first.

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Two strand policy – Building the evidence base and building the infrastructure to act on it.

When he took on the attendance responsibility, Chris knew that he wanted to spend time understanding the barriers to attending school, so he contacted ImpactEd to enrol Teignmouth in the Understanding Attendance project. He was drawn to the national benchmarks and how the survey questions were designed to surface a more nuanced, human picture of why pupils weren't coming in. As he puts it, "data will only give you data – you have to go deep in that to get the human story." Rather than spending years trying to build something similar from scratch, he chose to invest in the expertise that already existed.  

Alongside the Understanding Attendance survey cycle, Chris was keen to build in touchpoints that would allow the school to monitor and respond to emerging issues in real time. So, in parallel, he set about tackling the practical groundwork to begin attendance improvements. This meant:

• Auditing whether or not the school had a compliant and robust absence policy

• Restructuring pastoral teams and creating new systems to streamline existing processes

• Introducing software to automate tasks that were previously done manually, freeing up staff time

Chris describes this year as the leadership team getting their ducks in a row. Without it, any subsequent intervention would have been built on unstable ground.

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Acting on the Evidence

With the foundations in place, the school leadership team was ready to act. The Understanding Attendance surveys identified three significant areas to improve on: pupils' sense of safety; sense of belonging and adult and pupil relationships. The findings gave Chris the evidence base to make the case internally that resources needed to shift.

"It's given the strategy credibility. When I argue we need to shift resources here to there, I can qualify that with strong evidence – not just something I've developed, but a nationally accredited, quality-assured evidence base."

The school responded to the results on several fronts.

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Targeting the Moveable Middle

A key strategic insight was recognising where the real attendance opportunity lay. The team recognised that it’s 30 severely absent pupils with highly complex needs, were already being supported by a dedicated team. The greater opportunity was the 150 pupils sitting between 91% and 94% attendance: present most of the time, but not consistently enough to be on track. Shifting the 'moveable middle' became the whole-school priority.

As part of the commitment to automate tasks and free up teacher time, school leadership introduced attendance software. The software produces a rolling report identifying pupils who have moved down an attendance band. Heads of Year, who led the process, send this list to form tutors. Each tutor is asked to have a focused conversation with five of those pupils per week. The aim of the interaction is to build genuine human connection: knowing the child's name, something about their life, asking how they are.

Chris provides teachers with a script to be able to have these conversations. Not to make them mechanical, but to ensure every child, regardless of which adult they speak to, receives the same quality of experience. There is a recognition that not every member of staff finds these conversations easy, but the structure provides support until it is second nature. The scripts are grounded in the Reach Foundation's framework of belonging and mattering, the idea that inclusion means being allowed in the room, belonging means being welcomed, but mattering means knowing your presence makes a difference. "We want kids to feel that they matter. Not just that they belong in the room, but that if you're not here tomorrow, everyone else has a lesser day. We need you as part of the family."

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Rebuilding Adult–Student Relationships

Responding to the survey findings about adult and pupil relationships required a careful approach with staff. The school subsequently collected pupil voice asking them about adult relationships. The sentences written out by pupils were anonymised and presented to teachers, being careful to avoid it sounding like criticism. Leadership framed feedback constructively: 'I love it when teachers do this… I found it really valuable when”.

The response from staff was strong, and Chris puts this down to the character of the team that had stayed through the school's turbulent years. Staff were then asked to reflect on what they had heard. The message of the exercise was simple: if you recognise something a pupil values and you know you don't currently do it, that is something you can change – and it costs nothing. No planning, no extra work. As the Chris puts it: "who of us doesn't want to enjoy our day and have better relationships?" It was an important change.

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Rewards: A Useful Short-Term Tool

Alongside the relational work, the school introduced a reward streak. Any pupil who achieves four consecutive weeks of 100% attendance qualifies for a whole-year-group celebration once a term: inflatables in the sports hall, candy floss, staff joining in. The key design principle was inclusivity. Unlike previous rewards tied to merit points (which favoured pupils who were already engaged), the streak is achievable by every pupil – if they have been absent earlier in the term, the four-week countdown simply starts from that point. Staff are primed to talk about streaks in the lunch queue, posters go up around school, and parents are kept informed. The celebration day itself becomes another opportunity for adult-pupil connection, with teachers joining pupils on the inflatables.

Chris is clear about its limitations, however. He acknowledges that rewards days have had a positive short-term impact, but it is not a long-term strategy. Its value lies in creating a shared moment for pupils and staff and reinforcing the norm that attendance matters but it does not replace the deeper relational work needed to move attendance forward. For now, the Teignmouth leadership do not know what is next for the rewards system, but they do know that pupils will be part of the decision in regard to what comes next.

Systems That Work Without Adding Workload

Underpinning all this work, is a deliberate approach to workload. Chris’ principle is: if you are going to introduce something new, you either take something away, or you build it so it requires no additional effort.

The aforementioned attendance software is one example of this. Tutors receive an automatically generated list of pupils, who have dipped in attendance, to speak to. They log conversations with pupils in the same system. Heads of Year can see at a glance which conversations have happened, and which haven't and members of leadership have a school-wide view. There is no additional reporting required and no extra meetings.

The model has proven robust enough that it is now being rolled out across all three schools in the Ivy Education Multi-Academy Trust.

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Progress so far

In 2024/25 Teignmouth school ended the year on 85.49% attendance. Year to date attendance for 2025/26 is currently 90.3%, tracking +0.7% ahead of the same point last year. This academic year is consistently beating last year, fluctuating +0.5% and peaks of +1.5%. These are early results, but the direction of travel is consistent.

Alongside the headline figures, Chris reports anecdotally that there are various individual cases where pupils have moved from 30-50% attendance to 70-80%, as a result of feeling heard, having their barriers identified, and seeing adults try to help. Chris senses that being listened to is itself a driver of improvement.  

Disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND remain the school’s most significant outliers, and a newly appointed attendance officer (a former SENCo) is now focused specifically on this cohort, using ImpactEd’s SEND report alongside question-level analysis to identify what distinguishes those within the group who are attending well from those who are not.

Teignmouth School’s pupil voice surveys (conducted independently of ImpactEd) show that pupils have noticed the change in how staff relate to them which also supports the shift that can be seen.  

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Final reflections

Chris’ advice to any school starting out is straightforward: understand your problem before designing any strategy.

Chris recommends doing your own data analysis first; identifying the outliers, being as granular as possible. Taking part in Understanding Attendance then adds the layer that data alone cannot provide. “Your data tells you what the problem is; ImpactEd tells you why”.  

The practical implication is significant. Most schools have more ideas than capacity. If you can only act on three things, you need to know which three things will make the most difference. That is what ImpactEd gives you – the evidence to make that call with confidence.

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How can your school or school group get involved?

Join Understanding Attendance — and turn your attendance data into action.