Fixing Attendance: The Truth Campaign

A report recently dropped into my inbox. This happens a lot, as I’m sure it does in yours. However, this one caught my eye. Why? 'Listening, Learning: Attendance' by Impetus draws directly on the voices of Year 10 pupils from across the attendance spectrum. Not the policymakers. Not the statisticians. The young people themselves. To me, at least, this holds more value.

Their message? If schools want to re-engage them, they need to become places that care not just about attendance, but about the experience of being there. A sense of belonging. This isn’t a problem that trackers or fines can solve alone. Rebuilding attendance requires something deeper: connection, belonging, trust.

The report’s recommendations make sense. Value and structure social time. Expand enrichment beyond the classroom. Separate pastoral support from those issuing sanctions. Develop healthier norms around technology. Evaluate fines and other interventions. Listen to pupils and act. Listen to pupils? It’s this one we can learn from, I think.

This is why attendance is such a fascinating challenge. Too often, we assume that if we just explain the consequences of absence - poorer results, fewer opportunities, diminished prospects - young people will comply. But let’s give them some credit. I hate to break this news to you, but they already know this. Ask almost any teenager and they can recite the risks of skipping school. To repeat the message again and again is to disrespect their intelligence. It takes too much time and has limited impact.

It also echoes a flawed idea: that adolescents are incompetent thinkers, unable to comprehend cause and effect. In truth, much of their behaviour is not about ignorance, but about status. About identity. About respect. For some groups of learners, time off school has become the currency of status. It carries far more social value than a perfect attendance certificate ever could (whether they get their 100% attendance pencil or not).

If this sounds familiar, it should. We have been here before. Think of smoking. For decades, public health campaigns shouted about the dangers - lung cancer, yellow teeth, early death. And yet young people kept smoking. Why? Because the behaviour wasn’t about ignorance of risk. It was about identity. Smoking was a visible declaration of adulthood, independence, control. Attendance is at risk of becoming the same thing: less about ignorance, more about identity. A declaration of status. I stay off school because I can show others what I’m doing away from school. I can use social media to highlight my elevated social status and identity. This is powerful, especially if you’re a teen. 

Let’s discuss the Truth Campaign, for a moment. A radical shift. Instead of lecturing, it assumed teenagers were smart. It reframed smoking as a battle of agency: young people exposing the lies of corporate giants, resisting manipulation, choosing control for themselves. The results were staggering. In areas where the campaign ran, teen smoking rates fell year on year.

The lesson for education is clear. If we want to re-engage young people with school, we must treat them as agents, not subjects. We must build cultures where they feel listened to, respected, and empowered. Where attendance isn’t just compliance, but a pathway to dignity, connection, and purpose. Pupils are the answer to improving attendance. We need to give them the platform. 

At Navigate, we often return to three anchors: safe relationships, predictable environments, accessible recovery. These are not optional extras. They are the preconditions for attendance. Because when young people feel safe, when the environment is predictable, when change is possible, the ground is laid for belonging. 

Young people can’t be passive recipients of our systems. They are active participants, constantly weighing up the social value of their decisions. The more we ignore this, the more they disengage. But the more we listen, the more we can harness their intelligence, their creativity, their drive to belong.

If we don’t listen to the young people in this report, what are we telling them? If we block and stop, if we turn our nose up and refuse to accept their comments, what will they learn about being heard and being valued? How might our silence discourage their honesty in the future?

Attendance isn’t about dragging young people back into buildings. Some schools have had success here, but then lands the ‘attendance versus engagement’ problem. It’s about reshaping those buildings into places worth attending - safe, predictable, and alive with the possibility of change and recovery. If we’re clever about the platform and message we give young people, can they instigate the post-covid attendance revolution we need?