School leaders are still facing problems with the government’s AI-generated attendance reports, despite them being re-issued after errors – as a government leader cautions “no model is perfect”.
Leaders who spoke to Schools Week said they had been told to learn from schools hundreds of miles away, their own school, or in some cases were not linked with any settings at all.
It comes as polling shows 80 per cent of headteachers think pairing up schools won’t make a difference to their attendance levels.
How do reports work?
Schools were issued new versions of their government attendance baseline improvement expectation reports last week, after the first reports were found to contain mistakes.
The reports include an AI-generated target to raise attendance levels, and rank schools within a group of 21 similar settings. Schools are then given four “better-performing” schools that they are encouraged to network with and learn from.
Schools are grouped together based on factors including the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals, with social, emotional or mental health needs, English as an additional language, or in an urban or rural setting.
The Department for Education told teachers earlier this week this “provides an intelligent alternative to judging attendance solely against the national average”, which “includes schools in very different circumstances”.
“Not only does this provide you with greater transparency on the schools we’re comparing you against, but it also provides an opportunity for you to reach out to those schools and create networks,” the DfE added.
‘It’s quite valuable to see in person’
But Stephen Ferguson, deputy headteacher at Kingsmeadow Community School in Gateshead, said although the similar schools was a “really positive feature”, most schools listed in his report were in London or the south. They also all belonged to multi-academy trusts, whereas Kingsmead is a local authority school.
“It’s difficult to really do any sort of collaborative work with schools around a feature like attendance, if actually the similar-schools report generates schools that, once you get under the surface, aren’t quite similar … geographically, it’s hard to get there and work with them.
“Yes, we can do it online or over the phone, but often the systems have multiple layers and depths to them. It’s quite valuable to see in person.”
Other schools, including Dartmouth Academy in Devon and Trinity Academy St Edward’s in Barnsley, were ranked among the top of their similar school groups.
They were told to go to their own school for advice.
Mark Allen, principal of Trinity Academy St Edward’s, said: “Because it’s AI-generated, you lose the kind of human intuition … that’s disappointing, you’re invested in this and yet it’s telling me to look at my own school for help.”
‘That’s no context’
Andy Goodwin, safeguarding and attendance lead at Dartmouth Academy sponsor Education South West, said the reports “are on the journey toward what I think a lot of us have been crying out for, which is ‘please tell us who contextually we are similar to’”.
However, he added the reports have “some massive weaknesses” and leaders “don’t fully understand how they’ve made the decision about the context”.
Another of the trust’s settings, a technical college for 14- to 19-year-olds, was told to learn from other 11-18 secondary schools.
“That is no use, that’s no context,” Education South West trust chief executive Robert Coles said.
Nigel Attwood, headteacher at Bellfield Junior School in Birmingham, said his latest report did not include any schools to go to for support. The attendance data on the report was also wrong, he said.
In the school’s initial report, Attwood said he had been recommended another school with about 60 per cent of its pupils receiving pupil premium funding – the same as his school. But others recommended had half the proportion.
“I think it’s another document that’s costing money that we could have used somewhere else,” Attwood said.
‘No model is perfect’
According to Teacher Tapp, the sector agrees with the leaders’ concerns.
In a poll of 10,000 school staff, 80 per cent of heads, 82 per cent of teachers and 76 per cent of senior leaders thought pairing schools wouldn’t make a difference.
Sir Kevan Collins, the DfE’s lead non-executive director, told a teacher webinar about attendance on Tuesday there is “never, ever a perfect match”, and that the scheme was still in its test-and-learn phase.
“One of the things we want to do in this first year is test this with you. We want to find out whether we’re matching you with schools you recognise as your own, or whether we need to make adjustments. No model is perfect.”
The DfE said while school region is given “appropriate weight” when forming the similar school groups, technology allows schools to “transcend location”. It added that if a school sees their own name as a high performing school, it “is not a suggestion they should contact themselves for support”.
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