Turning up is more than half the battle

One of the themes of my blogs this year has been to highlight the important of regular attendance to school. Good attendance (alongside reading good quality fiction) is the best way to guarantee success in school. The correlation between attendance percentages and academic progress (at any ability level) is amazingly close…basically, the more a student turns up to school the better they will do.

Now I’ll be honest. Before Covid, attendance rates at MHS were slightly below the national average. It was something we were working hard on without a great deal of success. Since Covid, the rates of attendance at all schools have dropped across the country. I am sure there are loads of reasons for this, but the basic fact remains that better attendance equals better outcomes for young people, and so raising attendance is front and centre of our work. Missing a day here and there really does matter, as it breaks the flow in learning and makes it harder for students to keep up.

The good news, unlike before Covid, is that attendance at MHS is now comfortably above the national average and is improving as the year goes on. The picture here shows the weekly attendance of MHS students in pink, versus the average secondary school attendance across the country in grey. We’re well ahead, which is GREAT, but we’re still lower in terms of our overall attendance compared to 2019. As we say here, ‘better never stops’ and so we’ll continue to push good attendance for all learners. After all, the secrets to success are to ‘turn up and read, turn up and read and turn up and read‘.

Finally, a belated congratulations from me for the U13 girls football team who were crowned Stockport League Champions at Edgeley Park last week, with a 3-0 win over Cheadle Hulme High School. It’s a fantastic achievement! Well done too to all our sports teams over the year – especially the U15 girls for falling only at the very last hurdle in their own final last night.

Have a great weekend,

Joe Barker

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