Most school owners I speak to understand that their attendance matters. Far fewer really understand the true financial impact of failing to monitor it properly.
Some school owners think that because they have a CRM system that they can delegate or even worse, abdicate this important process. It’s a mistake many school owners make and it costs them lots of ‘hidden profit’. The truth is that schools lose £10,000’s every year through poor attendance tracking.
Many schools only become aware of a retention problem after a student has already cancelled. The reality is though that a ‘cancelled direct debit’ email should not be a surprise because the student has been on your ‘At Risk’ register for a while. The schools that are the most successful religiously and obsessively track attendance and have a clear ‘At Risk’ register and necessary tasks to get students back into the fold.
By the cancellation stage, recovery becomes significantly more difficult. The schools that perform the best have acted for weeks to try to avoid dropouts happening. Each week they have tried harder than the week before to get the student back into class. These are the same schools that grow year on year.
The reality is that attendance is often the earliest warning sign of future attrition yet so few school owners understand its importance. They manage to get to about 150 students and then wonder why they can’t push through to 200 or 250 active. They hit their self-imposed ceiling. I tell my mentees ‘what got you here won’t get you there’.
Students who stop attending regularly will:
- Lose momentum
- Feel disconnected from the school
- Experience slower progression
- Develop competing priorities
- Eventually cancel membership
The challenge is not that these students disappear.
The challenge is that many schools fail to notice and act too late, if at all. Don’t be that school owner.
What Typically Happens
A student religiously attends 2 classes per week. Then they miss a class. Then within 2-3 weeks they miss another. The cycle of attendance has then broken. Then approx 2 weeks after that they miss a full week of classes. Before you know it they are in your inactive box for 2-3-4 weeks and then they are out of the door.
It’s a very predictable cycle but because nobody is actively reviewing attendance, the absence goes unnoticed. Tracking attendance falls into the ‘important but not urgent category and thus is easy to push off until you have more time. At no point in running a professional school do you have ‘more time’, it needs to be carved into your working day. I used to stress at my team that ‘WE CAN NOT LET ATTENDANCE SLIP’ – it needs to be a daily, disciplined, systemised task. Team members need to be accountable for key tasks.
Eventually the parent says ‘I’m not paying for something that we don’t use’ or ‘I’m not forcing them to go’ and then they cancel their direct debit. Dependant on how good and reliable your monthly enrolments are you may be in a negative net enrolment figure, thus growth declines.
The school owner often experiences this as a retention problem. In reality, it was an attendance visibility problem. Tracking attendance is crucial to your school’s success.
Why Attendance Tracking Matters
An effective attendance tracking system allows you to:
- Identify at-risk students early
- Contact students before disengagement becomes permanent
- Improve retention
- Increase student success
- Organise make-up classes
- Strengthen parent communication
- Organise special 1:1’s to bring them back up to scratch
- Create a better overall student experience
Most importantly, it allows you to intervene before problems become cancellations.
“people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” – remind your team of this during your weekly team meetings and trainings. One of the biggest retention tools is actually showing your students and families that you care about their progress and that they benefit from your Black Belt journey. Know your students’ names, know their parents’ names, know what their parents do or where they work, know when grandma is poorly. The more you know, the more you care, the longer they stay around.
The Financial Impact
Consider a typical school we work with:
- 200 active students
- Average tuition of £100pcm (tuition should be higher than this, approx £150-£180pcm)
If improved attendance tracking prevents…
– just 1 cancellation per month,
– that’s 12 students per year you have saved and that represents:
12 students * £100pcm = £1,200 * 12 months =
£14,400 annual revenue saved!!! Without any additional marketing spend
In many cases, if the mentee implements our full retention system the number is considerably higher.
Imagine if it was just 2 students per month you saved – that would be £28,800 in gross you have just recovered – what would that do to your business?
Now, let’s remember that using the example above you haven’t enrolled any more students at a higher price point, this is just keeping hold of just 12 of the members already within your school.
You must put a financial number to your lost students because in my experience it creates more urgency on keeping them around.
The lesson is simple:
Retention often begins with visibility.
Visibility begins with attendance tracking.
Wondering How This Applies To Your School?
Every school is different. What is limiting growth in one school may have nothing to do with what is limiting growth in another.
That’s why we begin with a School Strategy Evaluation.
Rather than offering generic advice, the evaluation is designed to identify the specific operational, leadership, retention, or enrolment constraints affecting your school right now.
If you’re serious about improving performance and creating a clearer path forward, book your School Strategy Evaluation below.
Book Your School Strategy Evaluation Here:
https://dervishdervish.com/book-your-school-evaluation/
To your continued growth,
Sensei Dervish
6th Degree Black Belt
Founder — Sensei in the Room
Author | BSc | PGCE