The Department for Education will hire up to eight new advisers as part of its drive to improve attendance support offered by councils, academy trusts and schools.
The move will only increase the size of its squad of advisers to 13 at most however, after a decade-long squeeze on budgets that saw many local authority attendance jobs axed.
Two councils alone, Salford and Brighton and Hove, announced 14 posts would be slashed in the early 2010s.
The government set out prescriptive new minimum national standards for council, trust and school attendance policies and support earlier this month. Ministers had dubbed councils’ varied current approaches a “postcode lottery”, with some areas issuing far more fines than others.
