UCU: Attendance monitoring in FE

Motion

Motion text: Conference notes that:
1. Young people are now required to remain in education until the age of 18.
2. This has fundamentally changed the nature of FE without significant improvements in funding or management culture.
3. Attendance in schools and colleges has fallen off since Covid leading to national concern on this issue.
4. Attendance is a safeguarding issue.
5. In schools, there are dedicated staff to manage non-attendance while in FE this falls on already overworked teaching and pastoral staff, often with punitive consequences when they are not successful.
6. Young people face complex barriers to accessing education such as poverty, mental health issues and caring responsibilities.
Conference calls on FEC to:
a. Campaign for colleges to remove the unreasonable expectations from teaching staff that they must be solely responsible for students’ attendance.
b. Lobby government to properly resource and support the recruitment of specialist staff to support attendance and access to education.