Macmillan Academy is a large secondary school serving a community with high levels of deprivation in Middlesbrough. Like many schools nationally, Macmillan was grappling with postpandemic attendance challenges. While overall attendance sat above the local average, it remained below the widely accepted 95% benchmark, particularly among occasional nonattenders.

The Academy wanted to move beyond traditional, punitive attendance approaches and instead develop a positive, evidencebased strategy that could support students and families to build and sustain good attendance habits, without increasing pressure on already stretched staff.

Caja partnered with senior leaders, pastoral staff and students at Macmillan Academy to design a behaviourally informed attendance campaign grounded in realworld insight.

We began with qualitative research, running COM-B informed interviews and focus groups with both staff and students across year groups. This helped us understand the practical, social and emotional drivers of attendance behaviour, including:

Using these insights, we combined behavioural theory with local context to codesign an integrated, schoolwide attendance campaign that focused on maintaining good habits among consistent attenders and nudging occasional nonattenders in a supportive, loweffort way.

The result was the “Get in There” campaign, a positively framed attendance initiative designed to be visible, consistent and easy to implement. Key elements included:

All materials were designed so they could be embedded into the school’s existing systems and sustained over time.

The campaign was piloted during the 2023–24 academic year. Comparing pre and postintervention data showed:

While marginal in percentage terms, these gains represent a meaningful shift at population level—equating to thousands of additional days of learning across the school year.

This project demonstrates how behavioural science can help schools tackle complex, entrenched challenges like attendance in a way that is practical, scalable and human.

By focusing on habit formation, social influence and positive framing—rather than enforcement alone—schools can create conditions that make attendance easier, more rewarding and more sustainable for students and families alike.