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Practice & Case Studies
3 minute(s) read

The Christmas Jumper story; what have we learned?

The story about pupils missing school for Christmas Jumper Day came to light in 2019. The leader of that work, Duncan Baldwin, reflects on what has happened with attendance systems and collaboration since then.

At this time of year my mind always turns to some work I was involved with on attendance when I worked for the Association of School and College Leaders.

I’d become very interested in what could be achieved if schools collaborated with each other using their data. Could schools working together do existing things, but faster, such as work out Progress 8 ahead of the official DfE release? Or, could they do new things, such as get deeper insights into areas such as attendance using what, at the time, were emerging “Big Data” technologies, such as machine learning?

A group of head teachers worked with me to explore this idea and agreed for their management systems to be connected. I believe we were the first group to get granular, day-by-day attendance data from several schools on one PowerBI dashboard. As we looked at attendance lines wobbling about for around a dozen schools, I can vividly remember one of the heads pointing to a noticeable dip in attendance which several of the schools recorded on the same day in December. “What’s that? Was it snowing?” he wondered. (We were, after all, based in the north-west where it does get a bit chilly from time to time). 

It turned out that the day in question was Christmas Jumper Day. Personally I had always suspected that “fun” days like this were not fun for everyone and here, for the first time, was data to support that. Rather than come to school, many children were opting out and staying at home.

Get it off the school calendar!

One of the heads was so taken aback that he rang his school and told them to remove the day from the calendar. But not every school in our group had the same issue; two schools took a different approach and ran a community service day. Everyone wore school uniform, no (expensive) funny jumpers were needed and no £1 voluntary contribution was requested from parents. Pupils in those schools carried on attending as they normally did and worked together to help others. 

From Mother’s Day to Taylor Swift

The story made it into TES and captured some of our findings but didn’t quite get it all right. The data actually showed that the attendance of non-disadvantaged pupils also fell. It’s not hard to work out possible reasons why. Following on from this discovery we used machine learning to investigate the impact on attendance of other special days. One school saw a very large increase in the probability of disadvantaged pupils being absent on their birthday, or a day either side. Again, it’s not hard to think of reasons why that might be the case; opting out might be the easiest way to avoid the question “What did you get for your birthday?”. Head teachers in Liverpool, where I work as a School Improvement Partner, tell me that there are many special days that affect attendance, ranging from Mother’s Day to Taylor Swift. And of course, let’s not forget the football.

Collaboration, or accountability?

These days schools collaborate using their attendance data with their trusts and local authorities, and even send it to the DfE on a daily basis. As a result, schools are now much more tuned in to issues like this and, I believe, more thoughtful about the impact of what they do on different groups of pupils. Back then I had been keen that schools should take ownership of the process so that they remained in control of its use and would benefit from its findings, much as they had done in this story. I was concerned that if the DfE took this on, the inevitable result that useful data would be turned into hard accountability. Unfortunately I believe this is what has happened.

Marginal gains

With schools still working valiantly to get attendance back to pre-Covid levels, the Christmas Jumper story was a salutary reminder that there is no silver bullet when it comes to improving attendance. There are many small things we can do, and many small things we can avoid doing. Improving attendance means getting the right small things right all the time, and thinking very carefully about how our actions as a school, however well intentioned, may not work for all of our students.

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Attendance Matters is a collaborative space for education professionals exploring school attendance. Run by a group of experienced educators, governors, and parents, it connects research, policy, and real experiences to promote fair and inclusive practice. Sponsored by Attend, all editorial content is created independently.

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