These resources were originally published 9 February 2024.

About the resources

Understanding attendance research summary

This resource summarises key research on school attendance from CESE's Understanding attendance evidence paper. It outlines evidence‑based strategies that can support school leaders and teachers to understand attendance challenges and strategically plan to improve attendance in their schools.

Schools can use this resource along with the Tell Them From Me (TTFM) and student attendance Scout guide, which shows how the different elements of the new Plan for NSW Public Education that drive attendance can be seen through TTFM reports.

These evidence-based resources complement the suite of resources for schools available on the Attendance matters website. They aim to support school leaders to develop and implement attendance improvement and progress measures in their school’s Strategic Improvement Plans.

Understanding attendance – an updated research review on school attendance

This resource published on 12 July 2024 is an update to the evidence paper on student attendance produced in 2022 by CESE.

The original paper synthesises the research on student attendance and identifies key drivers of attendance and absence from school, discusses why regular school attendance is important, and outlines the evidence-based strategies that work best to improve attendance.

This resource updates the original paper with new research on student attendance and expands on issues of particular relevance to schools in a post‑pandemic context.

Tell Them From Me and student attendance

A guide for using Scout as a tool to identify themes that support student attendance. This guide will provide examples of school-based drivers of attendance and illustrate how to use Scout to make correlations or distinctions between aggregated TTFM data and student attendance. It is designed to assist school leaders to examine their TTFM data as part of their usual attendance planning processes and can be used in conjunction with the department’s Planning to improve attendance resource hub.