Attend+

About Graeme Baird

Hi, I'm Graeme Baird. I'm a psychologist, and for the past 15 years I've worked in schools — mostly Special Assistance Schools, 12 of them across four Australian states.

My passion is simple: helping schools get their most disadvantaged students through the gate more often. Why does that matter so much? Because how often a young person shows up to school is one of the strongest predictors we have of how their life turns out — both personally and professionally.

That's why I set up Attend+. We help schools lift attendance by reducing suspensions and exclusions, and by tackling school avoidance head-on.

About Attend+

Attend+ trains teaching staff — in both mainstream and Special Assistance Schools — to support two groups of students:

1. Students avoiding school (sometimes called “school refusal”)
2. Students who've been suspended, are about to be suspended, or are on restricted timetables — what's sometimes called “soft suspension”

Our core belief: attendance improves when students feel like they belong.

Everything we do comes back to one goal — helping students show up to school, ready to learn, day after day. We believe that starts with relationships. When a young person feels seen, valued and connected to the adults around them, school stops being somewhere they have to be, and becomes somewhere they want to be.

Interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline

Regular school attendance is one of the clearest predictors of long-term success. The flip side is just as real: students who don't attend regularly are far more likely to end up in the school-to-prison pipeline. So our guiding rule, in everything we do, is this — protect the young person's connection to their school.

How can we help?

Read more from Graeme on the McAlpine-B blog.