# Using Data Mining in Educational Administration: A Case Study on Improving School Attendance
## 5 Results and Discussion
### Evaluating the Overall Improvement in School Attendance  
The full-year attendance comparison is presented in Table 7. It can be seen that initiatives in the Spring and Summer terms of the 2018/19 have contributed to an improvement in the whole school attendance for the full academic year. Indeed, WPS achieved the required attendance target of 96% for the first time in four years in 2018/19.  
Data in Table 7 also reveal the success of the Monday Matters initiative on the full-year attendance data. Monday AM and PM sessions showed the largest increase in attendance, with increases of 1.8  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c c} \hline \hline  & **2015/16** & **2016/17** & **2017/18** & **2018/19** \\ \hline Average Attendance (\%) & 94.4\% & 94.5\% & 94.2\% & 96.5\% \\ Range & 6.2\% & 5.3\% & 4.5\% & 2.8\% \\ Median & 94.5\% & 95.0\% & 94.1\% & 96.4\% \\ No. of Mondays & 12 & 11 & 12 & 10 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 6: Comparison of Monday Summer term attendance data for I2.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c c} \hline \hline
**Session (J\({}_{1}\))** & **2015/16** & **2016/17** & **2017/18** & **2018/19** \\ \hline Mon-AM & 93.7\% & 93.7\% & 93.8\% & 95.6\% \\ Tues-AM & 94.1\% & 94.9\% & 94.6\% & 96.0\% \\ Wed-AM & 95.1\% & 95.0\% & 95.3\% & 96.1\% \\ Thur-AM & 94.9\% & 95.3\% & 94.8\% & 96.1\% \\ Fri-AM & 94.6\% & 94.7\% & 94.1\% & 95.3\% \\ \hline Mon-PM & 94.1\% & 94.5\% & 94.1\% & 96.2\% \\ Tues-PM & 94.7\% & 95.6\% & 95.1\% & 96.6\% \\ Wed-PM & 95.5\% & 95.6\% & 95.8\% & 96.4\% \\ Thur-PM & 95.5\% & 95.7\% & 95.4\% & 96.4\% \\ Fri-PM & 94.9\% & 94.9\% & 94.5\% & 95.4\% \\ \hline Average AM & 94.5\% & 94.8\% & 94.5\% & 95.8\% \\ Average PM & 95.0\% & 95.3\% & 95.1\% & 96.2\% \\ Overall (O) & 94.7\% & 95.0\% & 94.8\% & 96.0\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 7: Average attendance for 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, and 2018/19.  
and 2.1 percentage points respectively. As a result, Mondays no longer have the worst-performing AM and PM sessions, and the shift in focus now moves towards Fridays, where the underlying reasons for poor attendance may be quite different. Unlike Monday absenteeism, which is influenced to some extent by separation anxiety, Friday absenteeism may be more influenced by school withdrawal where parents may: (1) Want to extend the weekend or start holidays earlier to beat the rush and/or save on costs, and (2) sometimes assume that Fridays are typically low-value school days in which limited learning takes place and hence pursue other activities outside school [21; 23]. Hence, the action plan to tackle Friday absenteeism must be geared more towards school withdrawal as opposed to the Monday Matters initiative which was focused on tackling both school refusal and school withdrawal.  
One argument that parents do make on Friday absence is that their child(ren) have excellent attendance on all other sessions and these occasional absences should not impact the child and the school. While it is well-documented that all and every absence impacts pupil learning, the question of whether Friday sessions have now become the most impactful session to overall absence arose [1; 4; 21]. In line with this, the analysis detailed in Sections 4.2.2 and 5.1.1 was conducted on the 2018/19 dataset. It was clear from the results in Table 8 that Friday is now the most impactful day to be overall below the required attendance, with Fri-AM being the most impactful session. Mon-AM is no longer the most impactful session to be the overall below-average attendance for the first time in the four academic years.