Table of Contents
Type: Case Study | Subject: Education | Level: Masters | Word Count: ~3000 words
This model case study was produced by an Essays UK specialist as reference material for learning purposes only. For support in this field, see our education assignment support.
You are the newly appointed Assistant Headteacher for Inclusion at a fictional UK secondary academy with persistently high rates of pupil absence. The senior leadership team has asked you to analyse the drivers of poor attendance among disadvantaged pupils using recognised ecological and behavioural frameworks, and to recommend a whole-school improvement strategy for governors.
Hartbridge Park Academy is a fictional 11-16 secondary academy of around 950 pupils, used here to illustrate a case study in school attendance improvement. The school serves a high-deprivation ward in a large city in the North of England, with just over 40 per cent of pupils eligible for pupil premium funding, well above the national average, and is part of a fictional multi-academy trust, Calderwell Learning Trust. Over the two academic years since the return to full-time education following pandemic-related disruption, Hartbridge’s overall absence rate has risen from 6.8 per cent to 11.4 per cent, and the proportion of pupils classified as persistently absent, missing 10 per cent or more of possible sessions, has increased from 18.1 per cent to 31.2 per cent of the roll. The trust board has commissioned this case study to diagnose the underlying causes of the decline and to recommend a whole-school improvement strategy ahead of the next governors’ meeting.
National data indicate that Hartbridge’s experience, while acute, is not unusual: persistent absence among disadvantaged pupils nationally has remained substantially elevated compared with pre-pandemic levels (Department for Education, 2022), and schools serving high-deprivation catchments have generally seen the sharpest and most sustained increases. Simple compliance-focused responses, such as increased use of penalty notices, have had limited effect at Hartbridge, and the senior leadership team has asked for an analysis grounded in recognised theory rather than a further tightening of sanctions alone.
This case study applies Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory to situate individual pupil absence within the wider system of family, school and community influences that shape it, before applying the COM-B model of behaviour change (Michie, van Stralen and West, 2011) to diagnose the specific capability, opportunity and motivation barriers preventing regular attendance among the pupils of greatest concern. As with the other cases in this series, Hartbridge Park Academy, Calderwell Learning Trust, and the data presented are fictional constructs created for academic illustration and do not describe any real school.
The stakes for Hartbridge’s governors are significant beyond the immediate registration figures. Gottfried (2014) demonstrates a robust association between chronic absenteeism and weaker academic and socio-emotional outcomes even after controlling for prior attainment, while Balfanz and Byrnes (2012) find that persistent absence in the secondary phase is one of the strongest single predictors of non-completion, ahead of prior attainment for some pupil groups. For Hartbridge, whose GCSE cohort in three years’ time will be drawn substantially from the current Year 9 and Year 10 pupils identified as the highest-risk groups in Table 1, the trust board’s concern is therefore as much about medium-term attainment and progression as about in-year registration compliance, which is why the board has asked for a diagnostic analysis rather than a further tightening of the existing procedural response.
Hartbridge’s attendance team, comprising an attendance officer and a part-time family liaison worker, reviewed registration data by pupil group ahead of this case study. The data show that the increase in absence is concentrated among three overlapping groups: pupils eligible for pupil premium funding, pupils with an identified special educational need or disability (SEND) but no education, health and care plan, and pupils in Years 9 and 10. Table 1 summarises persistent absence rates by pupil group for the most recent full academic year against the position two years prior.
| Pupil Group | Roll (n) | Persistent Absence – Current Year | Persistent Absence – Two Years Prior |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole school | 948 | 31.2% | 18.1% |
| Pupil premium eligible | 391 | 42.6% | 24.3% |
| SEND (no EHCP) | 168 | 39.9% | 22.7% |
| Year 9 | 187 | 35.8% | 19.4% |
| Year 10 | 182 | 37.1% | 20.6% |
| Not pupil premium / no SEND | 412 | 19.8% | 12.9% |
Attendance officer case notes, reviewed anonymously for this case study, identify a recurring set of contributing factors among the most persistently absent pupils: irregular sleep and morning routines linked to family circumstances, unresolved low-level anxiety about specific lessons or peer relationships, caring responsibilities for younger siblings or unwell family members, and a smaller number of pupils reporting that they did not see the point of attending given their academic trajectory. Fewer than a third of the most persistently absent pupils have a formal, actively reviewed attendance support plan, and first-day contact with families, texting or calling home on the first day of an unexplained absence, is inconsistently applied due to capacity constraints in the attendance team.
The school’s current response is largely procedural: automated first-day text messages where capacity allows, a tiered system of attendance panels and, ultimately, referral for statutory intervention including penalty notices for cases meeting the threshold. Case notes suggest this procedural response has had limited effect on the pupils of greatest concern, whose absence appears to be driven by underlying capability, opportunity and motivation barriers rather than by a simple lack of awareness of the school’s expectations.
A short structured consultation with form tutors, undertaken as part of preparing this case study, adds qualitative texture to the registration data. Tutors consistently reported that the pupils causing greatest concern were not, in the main, openly defiant or disengaged in lessons when present; several described pupils who appeared genuinely anxious about specific triggers, an upcoming assessment, a strained peer relationship, or a particular subject where they felt persistently behind, and who used absence as an avoidance strategy that then compounded the underlying difficulty through missed content and widening attainment gaps. Tutors also raised capacity concerns of their own: with an attendance officer covering the whole school and a family liaison worker employed for two days a week, there is little time for the sustained, relationship-based follow-up that tutors felt the most complex cases required, and several tutors noted that by the time a case reached a formal attendance panel, patterns of absence were often already well established and correspondingly harder to reverse.
Two complementary frameworks are applied: Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory, to situate individual absence within the wider system of influences surrounding each pupil, and the COM-B model of behaviour change (Michie, van Stralen and West, 2011), to diagnose the specific barriers preventing regular attendance.
Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) model conceptualises child development, and by extension behaviours such as school attendance, as shaped by nested environmental systems: the microsystem of immediate settings such as home, classroom and peer group; the mesosystem of interactions between those settings, for example the relationship between home and school; the exosystem of settings that indirectly affect the pupil, such as a parent’s employment circumstances; and the macrosystem of wider cultural and economic conditions. Applied to Hartbridge, the case notes indicate that absence among the pupils of greatest concern is rarely explained by a single microsystem factor in isolation; rather, difficulties at home, such as irregular routines linked to family circumstances or caring responsibilities, interact with mesosystem gaps, weak and inconsistent communication between school and family, to produce a pattern of absence that a purely school-based, compliance-focused response is unlikely to resolve.
The exosystem is also relevant: several of the most persistently absent pupils’ case notes reference parental working patterns, including shift work and multiple jobs, that constrain parents’ capacity to support consistent morning routines, a factor entirely outside the pupil’s own control and largely outside the school’s direct influence, but one that a well-designed mesosystem intervention, closer and more practical school-family communication, can partially mitigate. Christenson and Reschly (2010) argue that attendance interventions focused solely on the pupil, without engaging the family and community systems around them, consistently underperform those that work across the mesosystem, a finding consistent with the limited impact of Hartbridge’s current, largely pupil-facing procedural response.
Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) macrosystem is a more distal but still relevant layer for this case: national attendance policy, cost-of-living pressures on families in high-deprivation catchments, and the wider post-pandemic normalisation of flexible participation in some sectors of employment all form part of the cultural and economic backdrop against which Hartbridge’s individual attendance conversations take place, and none of which the school can directly change. The model has, however, been criticised for offering a rich descriptive account of the systems surrounding a young person without specifying precisely how a practitioner should intervene at each level (Tudge, Mokrova, Hatfield and Karnik, 2009), which is one reason this case study pairs it with the more intervention-oriented COM-B model below rather than relying on ecological theory alone to generate recommendations.
The COM-B model (Michie, van Stralen and West, 2011) proposes that any behaviour, including regular school attendance, requires sufficient Capability, physical and psychological capacity, Opportunity, the physical and social environment enabling the behaviour, and Motivation, the reflective and automatic processes driving it. Applied to the case notes, capability barriers are evident for pupils reporting unresolved anxiety about specific lessons or peer relationships, who may lack the psychological capability to manage attendance-related distress without structured support; opportunity barriers are evident for pupils with caring responsibilities or irregular routines linked to family circumstances, whose physical and social environment does not currently enable consistent attendance regardless of their personal motivation; and motivation barriers are evident for the smaller group of pupils who report not seeing the point of attending given their academic trajectory, whose reflective motivation to attend has weakened over time.
Crucially, the COM-B model highlights that Hartbridge’s current response, first-day contact and escalating procedural consequences, addresses none of these three barrier types directly: it assumes pupils and families already have sufficient capability, opportunity and motivation and simply need reminding of the requirement to attend, an assumption the case notes do not support for the pupils of greatest concern. Michie, Atkins and West (2014) note that behaviour change interventions targeted at the wrong barrier type, for example addressing motivation where the true barrier is opportunity, are unlikely to succeed regardless of how consistently they are applied, which may partly explain why Hartbridge’s existing procedural response has not reduced persistent absence despite consistent application.
The wider Behaviour Change Wheel, from which COM-B is derived, links each barrier type to a set of intervention functions likely to address it: capability barriers are best addressed through education and training, opportunity barriers through environmental restructuring and enablement, and motivation barriers through persuasion, incentivisation and modelling (Michie, van Stralen and West, 2011). Mapped onto Hartbridge’s case notes, this points towards a structured anxiety and transition-support pathway, a training-based intervention function, for the capability-barrier group; practical, wraparound family support, an environmental-restructuring function, for the opportunity-barrier group; and only for the smaller motivation-barrier group would the school’s existing panel-and-sanction model, which sits closest to a coercion function in the Behaviour Change Wheel taxonomy, be theoretically well matched to the underlying barrier, which is one reason the recommendations below reserve statutory intervention for that group specifically rather than applying it uniformly across all persistently absent pupils.
Synthesising the ecological and COM-B analysis, four key issues emerge.
First, a mesosystem communication gap: inconsistent first-day contact and the absence of proactive, relationship-based family communication mean that Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) mesosystem, the connection between home and school, is currently too weak to support families in helping resolve the microsystem factors driving absence.
Second, capability barriers are unaddressed: pupils reporting unresolved anxiety about lessons or peers lack a structured, psychologically-informed route back into regular attendance, and the current panel-based procedural response does not build the coping capability the COM-B model identifies as necessary.
Third, opportunity barriers are unaddressed: pupils with caring responsibilities or home-routine difficulties face a physical and social environment that does not currently enable consistent attendance, a structural issue that penalty notices cannot resolve and may in some cases worsen by adding financial strain to an already constrained household.
Fourth, a fragmented support plan: fewer than a third of the most persistently absent pupils have an actively reviewed, individualised attendance support plan, meaning the school’s response to the small group driving most of the persistent-absence increase is largely reactive rather than planned and monitored.
Fifth, a capacity and monitoring gap behind the practice: the attendance officer and part-time family liaison worker are stretched across the whole school roll, form tutors report insufficient time for early, relationship-based follow-up before cases escalate to formal panels, and there is no routine, disaggregated reporting of persistent absence trends by pupil group to governors between the annual data return referenced in Table 1, meaning the trust board has limited visibility of whether any given intervention is working until absence has already become entrenched.
Five recommendations follow, prioritised by the number of pupils affected and the speed with which each could realistically be implemented.
1. Strengthen the mesosystem through structured, relationship-based family contact. Move from automated first-day texting alone to a resourced first-day telephone contact model for pupils already flagged as at-risk, building the school-family relationship Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) model identifies as central to resolving microsystem difficulties.
2. Introduce individualised, actively reviewed attendance support plans for all persistently absent pupils. Extend the current plan beyond the third of pupils currently covered, with each plan explicitly identifying whether the primary barrier is capability, opportunity or motivation, following the COM-B (Michie, van Stralen and West, 2011) diagnostic structure, rather than applying a single generic response to all cases.
3. Build capability through a structured anxiety and transition support pathway. Introduce a small-group, evidence-based intervention for pupils reporting lesson- or peer-related anxiety, addressing the psychological capability barrier the COM-B model identifies rather than relying on escalating procedural consequences.
4. Address opportunity barriers through practical, wraparound support. For pupils with caring responsibilities or home-routine difficulties, work with the family liaison worker and external agencies to address the physical and social environment directly, for example through signposting to family support services, rather than treating these cases as primarily a compliance issue.
5. Reserve statutory intervention, including penalty notices, for cases where capability and opportunity barriers have been actively addressed and motivation remains the clear, primary barrier, ensuring the school’s most punitive response is applied where it is most likely to be effective rather than as a default escalation route.
6. Establish termly, disaggregated attendance reporting to governors by pupil group, tracking movement between the categories in Table 1 rather than the whole-school average alone, so that the trust board can see whether the barrier-specific interventions above are narrowing the gap for pupil premium, SEND and Year 9 and 10 pupils specifically, and can reallocate attendance-team capacity towards whichever barrier type proves hardest to shift.
Implementation should prioritise recommendations 1 and 2 immediately, since they require no additional external resource and directly address the mesosystem and diagnostic gaps identified above, with recommendations 3 and 4 phased in over the following two terms as capacity and external partnerships are established, and recommendation 5 applied on an ongoing basis as the individualised support plans identify appropriate cases. Recommendation 6 should begin alongside recommendation 2, since the disaggregated reporting depends on the same individualised, barrier-coded support plans and provides the governance mechanism through which the trust board can hold the strategy to account over time, addressing the capacity and monitoring gap identified as the fifth key issue above.
This case study has examined the rise in persistent absence at Hartbridge Park Academy, a fictional UK secondary academy, and diagnosed its causes using Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory and the COM-B model of behaviour change (Michie, van Stralen and West, 2011). The analysis indicates that the school’s current, largely procedural response addresses compliance rather than the underlying capability, opportunity and mesosystem-communication barriers driving absence among the pupils of greatest concern, which may explain its limited impact to date.
The recommendations proposed therefore prioritise strengthening school-family communication and individualising support planning immediately, with capability- and opportunity-focused interventions phased in over subsequent terms, and statutory sanctions reserved for cases where they are genuinely likely to be effective. Term-by-term, disaggregated governor reporting is recommended to ensure the strategy is adjusted in light of evidence rather than applied uniformly regardless of impact.
Two limitations should be noted. First, this analysis relies on attendance-team case notes and a short staff consultation rather than a structured survey of pupils and families directly, meaning some barriers may be under-represented if they are less visible to staff than to families themselves. Second, ecological and behavioural frameworks describe why absence persists but cannot, on their own, guarantee that a resource-constrained school can implement every recommendation simultaneously; sequencing, as set out above, is therefore essential. As with the other cases in this series, Hartbridge Park Academy and the figures presented are fictional constructs created for academic illustration and do not describe any real school.
Need a Model Case Study Written to Your Exact Brief?
Our 350+ UK-qualified writers deliver referenced model documents from £15 per 250 words, with free plagiarism and AI-detection reports.
You May Also Like
All work is written by human writers. 100% AI free, guaranteed.
100% money back guarantee if you find plagiarism in our work.
COMPANY DETAILS
