To wonder why I've been asked to go to a Governor's Day meeting?

[AFewScrewsLucy]

So our school has a Governor's Day where a governor comes in and talks to various people about things'. Ive been summoned to a meeting to talk about attendance (I am in charge of the MIS, and do very little regarding registers) - also going is a head of year and the attendance officer. Now, this meeting is a mystery. All 3 of us have no idea what they want to know etc. so I asked HT for a bit more info, and all I got was, "just answer their questions", so I asked for the questions ahead of time, so we can answer them well, only to be told "there are no questions in advance... Just answer their questions on the day. So if the school doesn't know what they're asking, we don't know what we're being asked or why the meeting is even happening..AIBU to think this will be a big old waste of time???

Do any other schools do this?

We have governors who oversee various areas of the school and we often meet a couple of times a year. Might just be wanting to know more about your role and how they can support more?

Could it be the safeguarding link governor's visit and they have a focus on attendance?

Governors are obliged to oversee attendance. They will probably want to ask you about your processes, so they can be satisfied the school has suitable processes in place. I would be asking you things like:

• what is the attendance percentage across the school? How does that compare to national average/other local schools? Why is ours better/worse?
• what is the attendance rate for PP/SEND pupils?
• what is the persistent absence rate?
• are there any year groups with worse rates than others? Why is that?
• what are the school doing to support persistent absentees? What efforts are being made to get these children into school? E.g. phone calls home, attendance plans, incentives/rewards, staff going out to homes to collect children etc.

Well all of this I couldn't tell you.

Plus the attendance officer possibly wouldn't know the figures etc off hand? This is why we wanted to know the questions, so we could actually provide some sensible answers othe than "I'll have to check ... I'm not exactly sure but it's maybe 93%... Y10 have Lowest attendance, but not sure the reasons right now"

I am a school governor and when the board has been well-resourced we have had a link governor for attendance. If it were me coming in to talk to you about this I’d want to know that policies were understood and being adhered to, and I would expect you to know the latest % figures, or at the very least how you could obtain them. I do think if you are being invited to this meeting in the context of your attendance role it is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that you’ll turn up to the meeting with the latest data though. Don’t worry about it, the governors are there to make sure the school is being run properly and will be your “critical friend”, but I think it’s a good idea to cover some basic prep ahead of time.

As a governor I’d expect the people in charge of attendance to know the minimum of the above at the tip of their fingers prints. Attendance is also safeguarding.

I’d expect to know how many registers are taken on time, what the protocol is - if a child is marked in for reg and then absent for period 1 for example - what is the average attendance for each form and year group. Attendance for FSM and Sen and pp and is there are any differences. I’d expect to know what they do in cases of long term absence and identifying support needed for families or patterns eg child off every Friday etc and yes I would expect the above to be a weekly report of the attendance printed off and the slt in charge of attendance to have weekly meeting pastorally and with the attendance team - bloody hell - a bit frightening if the school doesn’t - ours does and has a weekly round Robin to all senior staff with specific updates on individual pupils!

I don't have an attendance role!

I'm just in charge of the database that holds the registers...

I wouldn’t expect you to know the answers off the top of your head OP but surely you must have a system which enables you to look at the percentages in real time? At the very least you need access to the data during the meeting.

If none of the three of you are in a position to talk about e.g. the reasons why a certain year group has lowest attendance then that’s pretty poor and is an area the governors will want to challenge you on and expect improvement.

Cross posted with you, well in that case your role in the meeting is to provide the data. The HoY and attendance officer will be expected to answer the other questions.

As you are in charge of the MIS and currently have very little to do with attendance stats I would expect that the main purpose of your presence at this meeting would be to have a conversation about how the MIS could be better used to make these kinds of stats more readily available/user-friendly and digestible to create KPI trackers and ring the right alarm bells at the right time. So the prep you can do is to look at how the attendance data is currently recorded in the MIS and dig around to see if there are any functionalitiesnot being used that could help

Yes i do have a system. Just seems like it would be easier to get the answers ahead of the meeting so we can discuss, instead of "oh one moment, let me login and run the report which provides no context as to why Year 8 are on 92% attendance, or child A is down to 76%"

🤷‍♀️

I already send automated reports to attendance officer after registration to chase missing regs, and gave an alert button for missing pupils etc and weekly summaries etc being automatically created and sent to people.

Maybe I will just go in and blow my own trumpet 😜

Ugh, Ilthis is what I mean, if I know what they want, I can have it ready, instead of trying to produce it in the middle of the meeting 🤷‍♀️

Yes definitely tell them about that!

I would suggest you turn up to the meeting with the reports of the obvious things highlighted in my bullet points above, if they then want any more specific data you can either run further reports in the meeting if possible, or tell them you’ll forward them afterwards.

Good idea 👍

These are the sort of things the governor is interested in though. You’ve been invited because you do these things and have access to more data.

The governor coming in really shouldn’t feel like something to worry about. They want to know about how you manage attendance, what problems you might be having and to help you to improve in areas. They’re not looking to trip you up.

When I go in to the school I’m a governor for, I’m interested in hearing about what they’re doing in my area and why. I ask questions and probe to find out more. But I’m looking to understand and help where we can.

A PP described it as being a critical friend and that’s right - the friend bit is really important. We volunteer as governors because we want to help the school succeed.

I'm not worried or thinking they're trying to catch us out ☺️ just thought it might be more useful to have an idea if what the meeting was about 😂

More questions they should be asking.

How many severely absent pupils do you have? (Pupils who have missed more than 10% of school sessions are considered persistently absent, while children who have missed more than 50% of school sessions are referred to as severely absent.)

How many of these are eligible for FSM? PP? SEND?
Which year group has the best/worst attendance? Why do you think that is?
What is your post 16 attendance like? (if you have one)
How many children who were PA/SA last academic year are still PA/SA.

Pupils NOT percentages. Governors should be asking about pupils.

Hmmmm. Interesting, I shall have to report back tomorrow afternoon!

When I was a governor we did these visits once a term, we decided what we wanted to see and the HT would make sure we had the right staff to talk to on the day.

It's the governors' job to do this sort of thing, your HT should know what it's about (as they are a governor by virtue of their position!)

Your HT is right, just answer the questions, but it sounds like they could have been more reassuring to you. There won't be a list of set questions.

But you will presumably have the responsibility of coordinating that data and other for the school statutory reporting. No matter how good the attendance team, we will always find some discrepancies/ errors when we do reviews of the preparatory reports for census.

Nope. Don't touch the data or inspect it or anything.

Literally set up subscriptions of relevant incomplete registration reports to be emailed daily/weekly/monthly. And that's only because my predecessor was about useless and told staff it wasn't possible to do this. So I set them up and then report/subscription server, to save them doing it manually.

I don't follow up or check if the Heads of Year have completed anything. The deputy head does all that.

Census completed by some PAs.

So forgive me I don't wish to be rude but what do you do all day!! (Or are you actually IT?)

Ha ha mostly MIS and attached systems. Making powerbi dashboards, setting up subscriptions to other data, training, integrations to other systems, developing reports, entire set up and maintenance and data modelling of academic tracking and reports. Seriously one guy was spending 40-60 hours every half term manipulating data, manually exporting, manipulating and reimporting information 😬

Undoing the shit that my predecessor implemented...

Tidying the data, trying to convince SLT that yes, we actually are breaking GDPR. A bit of work making people more efficient by automating tasks.

Also am developing and maintaining SharePoint portals.

And some IT Team stuff. Google and Microsoft Admin. email management and tracking.
Resetting bloody student passwords, fixing laptops and Chromebooks, asset management, training and supporting junior it colleagues/apprentices. Sometimes help with classroom support. And other stuff.

I work P/T and term time only though.