Understanding Attendance: Our school network

Over the past year, ImpactEd Evaluation's Understanding Attendance Research Project has expanded significantly, working with school communities across England to build a network spanning 250,000 pupils.

Our latest school map demonstrates the reach of our research. Each marker represents a participating school and the community it serves - educators, students, and families contributing to our understanding of attendance challenges. The blue markers indicate our secondary school partners and the pink represents our primary school partnerships.

Who are the schools Understanding Attendance?

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Urban Schools

The distribution reveals important patterns about the reach of our partnerships. Whilst clear concentrations around major cities including London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool are evident, the broader picture shows 82% of our partner schools are situated in urban environments. These areas, comprising major and minor conurbations (39%) and cities and towns(61%), face attendance challenges closely linked to complex socio-economic factors such as housing instability, high population mobility, diverse populations, and dense, often fragmented infrastructure.

The socio-economic complexity of these urban contexts becomes clear when examining Pupil Premium eligibility: on average, 33% of students across our urban school partners qualify for this funding. Within this group, 15% of schools serve communities where over half of pupils qualify, while 69% work with cohorts where more than a quarter are eligible. These figures highlight the broad spectrum of challenges faced by our partners in urban areas.

Rural Schools

Eighteen percent of our cohort consists of schools in rural villages, towns, and hamlets, many of which are in coastal areas. These communities face distinct attendance challenges shaped by geographic isolation, which affects transport infrastructure, employment patterns, and community dynamics. Our rural partners serve communities with lower average Pupil Premium eligibility at 19%, yet they encounter barriers that urban schools typically don't face. Geographic factors such as transport reliability, weather disruptions, and distance to schools create specific attendance challenges that require tailored approaches.

Geographic Patterns and Insights

Our work with a wide range of schools has deepened our understanding of the different factors that shape attendance across contexts. Our partnerships include 30 schools across the 10 local authorities with  absence rates (over 8.07% this year), which has provided valuable insight into areas where attendance challenges are most acute. While our geographic distribution is influenced by the multi-academy trusts we partner with, this coverage across high-absence areas has revealed meaningful patterns that inform our research. Our secondary school partnerships extend further in to rural areas, reflecting the wider catchment areas these institutions typically serve, while primary school collaborations cluster more around population centres, consistent with how these schools serve their immediate local communities.

Across both primary and secondary phases, including those in areas with the highest absence rates, attendance has consistently emerged as a key priority, highlighting its universal relevance regardless of school context. This diversity in settings, from rural secondary schools to urban primary schools including those in the most challenging local authorities, has strengthened the project considerably. As we know, attendance challenges vary significantly based on location, community characteristics, and individual school contexts, and working across such varied settings, particularly in areas experiencing the greatest attendance difficulties, has enhanced our understanding of how different factors influence attendance patterns and what approaches prove most effective in different contexts.

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Building Understanding Through Partnership

Working across such varied contexts has fundamentally changed how we understand attendance. Rather than seeking one-size-fits-all solutions,

“we've discovered that effective approaches must be as diverse as the communities they serve”.

Our network of school leaders, dedicated professionals who juggle countless priorities while maintaining a clear focus on each pupil’s needs, has become an invaluable research community where insights are shared collaboratively.

The attendance rates across our partners reflect this complexity, ranging from schools with consistently strong attendance to others address complex systemic challenges. Each school's story contributes essential pieces to our understanding of this multifaceted challenge. As we enter the next phase of our Understanding Attendance project, we're committed to deepening our insights by expanding our reach and building strategic partnerships to ensure our research is as representative as possible.

We're particularly eager to grow our network to include a broader variety of school types, each facing distinct challenges. All-through schools, special schools, and single-sex institutions all bring essential perspectives that will enrich our evolving understanding of attendance patterns and barriers.

To join the cohort of schools Understanding Attendance, apply here.

Our mission extends beyond simply understanding these attendance challenges. We're passionate about empowering schools to transform insights into meaningful action. By joining our research community, schools don't just contribute to the knowledge base, they become active partners inbuilding solutions that will help transform how schools across England support every child's journey toward consistent, meaningful engagement with learning.

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