One-to-one counselling and school attendance in the UK: a single group pre-post study

Objective: Absence rates remain high in UK schools, with negative implications for attainment, life chances and inequality. Reasons for non-attendance are complex but include psychosocial factors. Few UK-based studies have evaluated psychosocial interventions for school attendance outcomes or its moderators. This pre-post evaluation examined the potential influence of school-based one-to-one counselling on school attendance and possible moderators.

Design and setting: Secondary analysis of routine data, collected by a national mental health provider in primary and secondary schools.

Participants: 7405 pupils aged 4-19 years, with complete school attendance records at Time1 (pre-counselling term) and Time2 (the term when counselling ended).

Intervention: All participants received school-based one-to-one counselling with a trained counsellor between August 2016 and December 2019.

Outcomes: Percentage of school sessions attended (continuous) and persistent absence (binary; attending ≤90% of sessions) in a term. Potential moderators included sociodemographics, mental health and school engagement/enjoyment.

Results: Median Time1 attendance was 96%. 23.6% of participants were persistently absent. The intervention was not associated with improved percentage attendance (0.028%, 95% CI -0.160-0.216%) but was associated with 18.5% reduced odds of persistent absence (OR=0.815, 95% CI 0.729-0.911). We identified five moderators of change in attendance (interaction terms p<0.05): age group (improvements for 4-9 s; worsening for 15-19 s), improvement for some ethnicities and lower parent/carer education. Mental health and school engagement/enjoyment co-varied with attendance in expected directions.

Conclusions: One-to-one counselling may improve school attendance among persistently absent pupils, particularly at younger ages. Improving mental health and pupil engagement/enjoyment are potential intervention targets. Our hypotheses require confirmation with controlled designs.