Who is this template for?
This template is designed for Headteachers, Senior Leadership Teams (SLT), and Attendance Leads in Wales. It provides a clear, structured process to diagnose the barriers to good attendance in your specific context and develop a strategic, evidence-informed action plan for improvement.
Why use this template?
- Bring Clarity and Focus: It breaks down the complex issue of attendance into manageable components, helping you to evaluate your provision logically and systematically.
- Align with National Guidance: The template is directly based on the All Wales Attendance Framework, ensuring your self-evaluation and strategic planning are aligned with national expectations and best practice.
- Promote a Whole-School Approach: It helps to embed a culture where attendance is understood as a shared responsibility, encouraging all staff to contribute to creating a positive and supportive environment that encourages attendance.
- Drive Early Intervention: The diagnostic process helps you to identify and remove barriers to learning at an early stage, ensuring that pupils receive the support they need before attendance issues become entrenched.
- Foster a Data-Informed Strategy: It encourages the effective use of attendance data, moving beyond simple monitoring to a deeper analysis that informs targeted interventions and strategic priorities.
- Strengthen Partnerships: The framework helps you to evaluate and improve how you work in partnership with pupils, parents, and other agencies to ensure every child can benefit from the educational opportunities provided.
How does it work?
This template follows the standard, intuitive iAbacus process: make a judgement, verify it with criteria, provide evidence, analyse helping and hindering factors, and create a targeted action plan. The evaluation is structured around the following key areas from the All Wales Attendance Framework:
- Use of Framework
- Data, Targets and Evaluation
- Policies and Procedures
- Improving Outcomes for All
- Working in Partnership
- Curriculum and Teaching
Gaining Strategic Insight
For a trust or federation-wide Attendance Lead, the strategic power of this template is unlocked when evaluations from multiple schools are compared. By using the 'Stack' feature to view the completed 'Attendance Strategy' abacuses from each school, you can facilitate a powerful comparison of different approaches. This provides an instant visual analysis of which interventions are having the biggest impact on reducing persistent absence, allowing you to identify and share best practice across the entire group.
Clear, Professional Reporting
With a single click, a complete evaluation and action plan can be exported as a polished, visually compelling PDF report. For a Trust Board reviewing trust-wide performance, a report generated from a 'Stack' or 'Overlay' of multiple school abacuses offers a powerful, comparative overview. This high-level insight is perfect for informing strategic decisions, allocating resources, and ensuring accountability across the trust.
References / Source Material
How to Get Started
New to iAbacus? Discover how this template can support your improvement strategy. Book a personalised demo or start a free trial to explore the full platform. Visit www.iabacus.com to learn more.
Already a subscriber? You can find this template in the template library within your iAbacus account. Simply log in, create a new abacus, and select it from the list to get started.
