Waiting for persistent absence flags leaves schools too late, Warwick warns

Melissa Warwick wants the attendance plan finished before the first pupil walks through the gate in September. Speaking on Safeguarding in Focus, the CPOMS podcast, in a recently recorded episode, the operations manager at A Star Attendance said schools give curriculum, timetables and staffing weeks of summer preparation, and attendance processes deserve the same. Her test is plain: what happens when a child does not arrive on day one, and who knows about it.

The show's host, Sam Eustace of CPOMS, set the episode up around attendance and safeguarding as a single problem. He said CPOMS launched an integration with A Star's attendance system last year that syncs attendance data into CPOMS, so the attendance record and the safeguarding record sit together. Warwick, whose background is in school attendance, said her work with attendance teams and trust leaders keeps returning to systems and processes rather than percentages.

The pupil the percentage hides

Warwick's central point is that an attendance percentage is a weak early signal. She described a pupil sitting at 94 or 95 percent who would clear any threshold a school sets, yet whose record had been near perfect until a run of unexplained absences. If pastoral staff have also noticed a change in behaviour, the percentage alone is not alarming, but the change is.

Eustace put the same problem in arithmetic. A pupil could attend fully for four terms and drop away in the last one, and the year's average would still look fine. He asked what sits inside a year group's headline figure and whether there are smaller trends underneath it that need unpacking.

For a trust data lead or a headteacher reading a dashboard, the implication is uncomfortable. Reports built on cohort averages and threshold bands are built to find the pupils already in trouble. They are not built to find the pupil whose pattern has just broken, and Warwick argued that becoming proactive means looking for change rather than simple thresholds.

Missed Mondays and the question behind them

Warwick's working example was a child who starts regularly missing Mondays. An attendance team would spot the Monday pattern and open a conversation with the family. If the safeguarding system also shows that the parents have separated and weekend contact arrangements have changed, she said, the question changes from why the child misses Mondays to what is happening over the weekend that makes returning to school difficult.

She called that professional curiosity, and said it should not depend on someone remembering a detail in the right meeting. Systems that bring attendance and safeguarding information together and alert staff to a change do that remembering. The decision, she stressed, stays with the professional.

That division only works if the escalation routes exist. Warwick said teachers need to know what they are expected to notice and report, pastoral staff need to understand their role, attendance teams need clear escalation routes, and safeguarding teams need to know when attendance information should trigger curiosity. A designated safeguarding lead receiving alerts from an integrated system without those agreements gets more noise, not earlier intervention.

The US numbers show how late the threshold rings

The outside evidence comes mostly from the United States, where the standard measure is chronic absence, defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year. Governing reported in May 2021 that the share of American students chronically absent rose from one in six to one in four in 2020, with some districts reaching 40 percent. The same report noted the problem was not studied in depth, or even named, until early this century.

TNTP, citing Attendance Works, wrote that about 8 million US students were chronically absent before the pandemic and that the number had more than doubled by spring 2022. TNTP pointed to a study of Utah public school students in which a single year of chronic absence between eighth and twelfth grade was associated with a seven-fold increase in the likelihood of dropping out.

Those figures describe the problem entirely through the threshold, which is exactly Warwick's complaint. By the time the measure registers a pupil, the missed education is already banked. The complication for a school leader is that the standard measures, and the reporting attached to them, still run on thresholds, so a school acting on pattern changes will be tracking one thing internally while reporting another externally.

EdTech Magazine reported one district that moved from thresholds to patterns. In February 2025, according to the magazine, more than 38 percent of students in New York's Dunkirk City School District were chronically absent; a year later, after the district adopted an artificial intelligence system for tracking attendance and contacting parents, the figure was 20 percent. Superintendent Brian Swatland told the magazine the district chose the tool so attendance meetings could focus on students rather than on pulling and compiling data.

The magazine described the system flagging patterns such as absences rising on cold weather days and excuses that read as school avoidance, and texting parents once the morning register closes at 9 a.m. Swatland put parent response to those texts at 40 to 50 percent. Amy Bennett, chief of staff at Lightspeed Systems, told EdTech Magazine that chronic absenteeism is usually an early warning issue rather than a tracking issue, and that the aim of pattern detection is to highlight what needs attention while keeping decisions human-led.

The caveats are real. Dunkirk is one district over one year, the measure is US chronic absence rather than UK safeguarding, and none of the outside reporting examines the CPOMS and A Star integration itself. What the case does support is the mechanism Warwick describes: a system that watches for change, and staff who spend the recovered time on families.

What two recovered hours buy an attendance lead

Warwick described the attendance lead's morning as the test of a system. Instead of working through hundreds of pupils by hand, the system should already have surfaced the vulnerable pupil who is unexpectedly absent, the pupil whose attendance has deteriorated, the pupil approaching an agreed intervention point, and any attendance information that could be a safeguarding concern. The lead then spends the morning supporting those pupils rather than finding them.

Her procurement question follows from that. Schools should ask what a system gives staff time back to do, she said, and if automation returns two hours that previously went on administration, those hours become an earlier phone call to a parent, meeting a pupil at the gate, a home visit or a conversation with the designated safeguarding lead. That, in her words, is where the real return on technology sits.

Eustace acknowledged the cost problem for a large organisation, where the bill rises with volume. He argued the comparison has to be against the time saved, the hours spent and the current work to effort ratio. Warwick added that staff costing, time and even postage count on the other side of the ledger: a system that sends letters and handles similar tasks reclaims that spending, in her view, in abundance. For a trust finance director signing the contract, that reframes the case from licence price to staff time, with the attendance lead's morning as the unit to measure.

The September review Warwick wants done

Warwick's September list looks backwards first. Which pupils finished last year persistently or severely absent, where were patterns starting to emerge, which children have known vulnerabilities or significant transitions, and who had reasonable attendance overall that declined towards the end of the year. A fresh start for a pupil, she said, does not have to mean a loss of intelligence for the school.

The test she sets is her own question: what could I have noticed earlier. A school that answers it in October with the name of a pupil already past the persistent absence line has, on her account, found the gap in its September plan.