Having been responsible for attendance, pastoral and Safeguarding for more or less my last ten years as a Deputy Head in a very large Community Secondary School, I became increasingly aware of the links between Mental Health and school attendance even in pre-pandemic times. I would go as far as saying that nearly all of the young people who were registered as persistent absent from year  7 to Yr 13 were absent because either they or their carer was struggling with their mental health.

This begs the question of how schools respond to sometimes complex and challenging circumstances. (The slightly controversial element here is that the parents/carers may well be receiving help from adult mental health services, but they are unlikely to let the school know even where it is severely impacting on the children)

I am describing some of the practice we have used that has successfully worked in getting young people back into regular school attendance.

The start of all our pastoral concerns work is our multidisciplinary team meeting that we call Student Support Network Meetings, I’ve no doubt most of you will have something similar in place. This meeting   has become an essential part of our intervention’s strategy. The Team meeting is chaired by the Pastoral Deputy or a substitute and the team is the relevant Head of Year, Sendco, Counsellors, The School Attendance Officer, Mental Health Lead and if your lucky enough to have one the School Social Worker and any attached agencies like Youth Support Teams and when relevant the Designated Teacher for LAC either because they want to raise a concern or one of their students is being discussed. The team meets fortnightly for every year team.  Having a senior manager running these meetings served a number of functions

1. Provides continuity of process across all year teams.

2. Ensures that the meeting is focused on the students causing concern and keeps a balanced overview of students’ needs.

3. Heads of year are able to focus on the concerns being raised in a supportive environment.

It is the HOYs meeting to raise concerns about students and where they have concerns about the quality and effectiveness of any support that identified students may already be receiving. 

We have a very big sixth form, so the Director of Sixth would chair the meeting for year 12 and year 13, and it might also include the academic mentor or other specialist 6th form staff.

Students are discussed in our network meetings because they have been raised as a concern:

• Academic concerns around progress
• Referrals from staff because of wellbeing concerns
• Referral from HOY around failure to thrive, friendships, lack of academic progress, concerns from parents/carers.
• External reports or concerns around a young person (police, social care, housing, CAMHS)
• A catch all phrase failure to thrive, those young people who
• Referral from the Attendance Officer, Form Tutor, Head of Year about a young person’s attendance either because of Persistent Abscence below 90% or concerning patterns of attendance. (Missing on Fridays and Mondays or other regular days)

The team meeting will triage those young people not already known and identify action for someone to carry out.

For learning concerns or failure to thrive referrals, the SENDCO would be asked to get one of her team to carry out an initial screening of the young person. The result of the screening would come back to the meeting for a decision around action to be taken.

For wellbeing concerns, one of the Pastoral counsellors would be allocated to pick up the young person and have an initial conversation with them. They would then recommend further action,