Case Study: INOVA Multi Academy Trust

Here at INOVA Multi Academy Trust (formerly Tapton School Academy Trust) we have implemented A Star Attendance software across all of our nine schools. This includes five primary schools and four secondary schools, all based in Sheffield. We phased implementation across our schools based on the level of need as some of our schools have specific challenges based around socio-economic deprivation.

A Star Attendance allows our attendance teams to be much more efficient when managing the administration that goes with driving attendance across the school. The accuracy of the software in relation to knowing which pupils are at which specific legal stage has provided a great deal of confidence for our attendance leads so that they can are able to focus on the supportive aspect of improving school attendance.

The rigour now applied to the legal process enables leaders to be confident, but no child is being left behind in relation to challenging and supporting their individual attendance. This strategic approach has enabled attendance leads to provide greater levels of support to individual pupils including the creation of action plans, meetings with parents and home visits as and when required. The long-term sustainable improvement of attendance across our schools will continue to involve this dual approach of both challenge and support. Previously the schools across the trust were not consistent in how they managed attendance across the setting. Implementation of A Star has allowed the trust to start to form a consistent coordinated approach to managing attendance across our schools. This partial alignment of policy, procedure and process has resulted in an improvement when managing attendance at scale across an Academy trust. this enables reporting both at school and MAT level to have increased levels of rigour. It also allows trust leaders to direct and implement further support and capacity as and when required. The reporting aspect also provides clear concise data for the trustees so that they are able to understand the work that is taking place and challenge trust leaders if attendance rates are not improving fast enough.

Our experience during inspection has been overridingly positive. We have been able to demonstrate that individual schools are doing everything within the legal power to challenge parents when attendance rates do not improve or are declining. Further to this the rapidity of the school response has improved dramatically which is important in relation to improving attendance’s habits form quickly within certain people groups and therefore sporadic attendance can become normalised. This has been managed through the implementation of A Star Attendance.

A further advantage of the use of A Star attendance is the ability to manage and delegate priority home visits for vulnerable pupils. This function acts as a further fail safe, to support our DSL’s and safeguarding teams. Attendant Leeds point to the functions of bulk e-mail and letter communications saving significant amounts of time as part of attendance administration. They also mention the function of prompting the review of pupils moving to the next stage as being particularly useful ensuring that the correct pupils are having the right focus.

Reference Details

– Andrew Williams, Chief Inclusion Officer,INOVA Multi Academy Trust, Sheffield