The Department is planning to spend £1.3 million during 2006-07 on regional advisers working within the national strategies to provide specific support to local authorities and targeted schools on their attendance strategies.
In addition, we are also committing approximately £14 million to local authority behaviour and attendance consultants via the secondary national strategy standards fund grant which is targeted at supporting schools to implement effective strategies to improve behaviour and attendance. It is not possible to say precisely how much of this will be spent directly on attendance.
We have measured the effectiveness of our advisers and consultants through the analysis of absence data for 2005-06. This showed that, of the 370 secondary schools targeted for high absence in 2005-06, 52 schools met their absence targets for 2007-08. The 198 secondary schools targeted for persistent truancy reduced by 27 per cent. their number of persistent truants compared to their 2004-05 baseline.