Any ideas for getting primary school children into school on time?

Those kids are VERY young. That means that their parents are keeping them out of school. For whatever reason. You really need to address that reason. Here are some: 1. If you're in an immigrant community, many of the parents will use their childrent to translate for them when interacting with the government. In the US, this would be for Food Stamps, Welfare, whatever. 2. The older kids may be kept out of school to watch the younger kids while the parent/s are out working. 3. Transportation may be an issue. If you don't have busses to pick kids up, or if the kids have to do a bunch of things in the am (Like bathe and dress younger siblings, feed younger siblings, or even scrounge around to find food) then they're more likely to miss the bus and thus, stay home. 4. They may be working in the family business. 5. It may not be safe for them to travel from home to school. 6. They may not like school and are being truant (VERY unlikely in your age-range.) So, first, do an assessment and find out where these kids are! Then address THOSE needs. I doubt very seriously that these children are trauant just to be out of school. There is a real, social need that they are filling. Now, you can use the grant to address those needs. 1. Provide day care services on site for the siblings of your students. They can take them with them to school, plop them in, and take them back home after school. 2. A breakfast program may help. It for sure couldn't hurt. How about a food pantry? Perhaps you can take donations during the week, and open it up to parents on Friday (where the kids may be more unsure of getting a meal over the weekend.) 3. Work with the local police precinct to track the kids down and get them to school. 4. A lot of calls home, not to check up on truants, but to contact parents and really interact with them. It's not so easy to keep Gretchen home when we know Miss Grundy is counting on her being in class to be the milk monitor next week. 5. A Teacher-Mentor relationship with each child. Speak to the children about home as well as about school topics. Become a point of problem-solving for your students. This is not a motivational problem, it's a social problem. You have to address the social issues that affect your students. If you can do that, you'll find that your absentee issues will evaporate.

Do you know what factors are leading to the low attendance? If (for example) a large number of pupils are having to deal with public transit problems in getting to school, that would require a different approach from addressing students whose parents keep them home to care for younger siblings while the parents go to work

I've done some work on active commuting for kids. To summarize a bunch of research, low income kids face real challenges in getting to school. One big one is unsafe neighborhoods for walking. The problems can be violence or lack of infrastructure (cross walks, traffic lights, sidewalks, crossing guards). Short-term: the "walking bus" or an adult supervised walking group to get kids to schools. Long-term: advocate to fix the infrastructure. Get sidewalks, crosswalks and traffic lights. Walk every street within a mile of the school and figure out what's needed for kids to walk safely. Good luck. Getting kids walking (or cycling) to school has tons of long-term positive outcomes.

How large is the school population? Would opening free breakfast to all students (and parents once a week) be an option?

This is really extreme, but in http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one podcast on Harper High School, some of the students in the riskiest neighborhoods got rides from their teachers to get to school. Can you be more specific about why students are late/absent? The most useful fix will be different if this is a transportation issue vs. a safety issue vs. a motivation issue.

Nth'ing rtha -- school attendance is a symptom, not a problem. Solve the problem rather than gaming the symptom.

My district, which is a high poverty district in the US (around 2/3 receiving federal free lunches), instituted a program we call "Parent University." Parents in poverty, especially immigrant parents in poverty, do not know the social norms that middle-class teachers and administrators accept as inherent. What Parent University does is explain, in excruciating detail, what the expectations are (daily attendance!) and why it's important for their kids and how they can access help they might need to make that happen (food, childcare, transportation, etc.). It builds community among parents -- we have a large Gujarati-speaking immigrant community (for example), and we use that venue to connect new immigrants with immigrants of longer-standing who can help them navigate American school bureaucracy. We also always provide information for parents about GEDs (high-school equivalency), ESL classes for adults (English as a Second Language), and literacy classes for adults. We snare a HUGE number of men in the 15-25 age range who are "low literacy" but want to be able to read books to their little kids, and so enroll in literacy programs to learn to read picture books. Statistically, we know not a lot of these stories end with happy families and long-term parental engagement, but it is getting a very hard-to-reach population engaged in education and learning THE most crucial skill (basic reading), and a statistically significant number of them take classes and engage with their kids. The point is that parents do not necessarily know what their children need to do to succeed in American/British schools, and those skills can be taught, and most parents will jump all over the chance to learn them. There is a cultural literacy that has to be imparted, and the community can help create norms where those cultural minorities (who may be majorities in your school) are urged to participate. Our Parent University program came from the grassroots participation of low-income parents, who know the best way to cajole other low-income parents into participating. You MUST provide a meal at a Parent University program, and you MUST have "target" parents helping prepare the program. Another part of what principals and teachers do is just finding out what the needs are -- WHY is that student late to school? WHY does that student skip class? Sometimes it's because the parent needs the student to watch younger children and there's massive social service involvement, but sometimes it's at simple as, the family doesn't have an alarm clock and the electricity is frequently turned off. A battery-powered alarm clock completely fixes that problem, and we provide funds and flexibility for our social work staff to solve problems like that. I'm happy to put you in touch with our people who run these programs if they can be of any help to you; memail me.

Do you know why these 7-8% of students aren't attending? Understanding their obstacles is essential to designing effective interventions. It isn't directly related to your issue, but one approach to understanding a problem and modifying behavior is Community Based Social Marketing. One of its proponents, Doug McKenzie-Mohr, has a http://www.cbsm.com with a free online version of his book and a large database of case studies. While they're geared towards sustainability, there's a lot of generalizable content in his book that would help you design and test interventions.

Seconding free breakfast and free lunch. It's also a human rights issue, imo, because nearly 16 million US children live in food insecure households. Sometimes school is the only place children have access to regular meals.