How to Increase Student Attendance: 20 Proven Strategies

A recent study by The Association of Test Preparation, Admissions and Private Tutoring (TPAPT) shows that tutoring in specific subjects helps students achieve significant improvement in these subjects including higher scores on related standardized tests such as SAT and ACT. In addition, evidence reveals that tutoring works best when students attend frequent sessions (2-3 times a week) of at least 30 minutes each, throughout the year. Still, many schools and districts struggle with low student attendance in tutoring programs that are available for free.

This article gathers the 20 best strategies to increase student attendance in tutoring sessions that can be used by any school or other academic institution. They are based on the understanding that improving attendance requires a comprehensive approach that involves different stakeholders and simultaneously tackles student motivation, engagement, convenience, and communication.

Here are the top 20 ways to boost student engagement in tutoring programs for enhanced academic performance:

1. Understand the Specific Reasons Behind Low Student Attendance
2. Send Personalized Invitations
3. Get Parents Involved
4. Craft Personalized Parent Letters
5. Ensure School and Community Support
6. Capitalize on Teacher Recommendations
7. Send Tutoring Session Reminders
8. Launch Incentives and Rewards
9. Start a Competition Among Students
10. Set Up Clear Goals and Track Progress Consistently
11. Provide Flexible Scheduling
12. Offer Online Tutoring Programs
13. Make Sure Content and Activities Are Engating
14. Create a Welcoming Environment
15. Communicate Regularly
16. Collect Feedback and Adapt Tutoring Accordingly
17. Build Connections Between Tutors and Students
18. Make It Mandatory for At-Risk Students
19. Incorporate Social Elements
20. Create a Sense of Urgency and Scarcity

If you’re an administrator and your school or district needs supplemental instructional support including tutoring, resource room, state test preparation, or homework help, check out Fullmind. We provide customizable, online, synchronous tutoring services to reinforce classroom instruction so that every student succeeds.

If you’re a parent and your child needs personalized, flexible, one-on-one tutoring by qualified, state-certified teachers, check out iTutor. We offer a network of qualified tutors in all subjects for ages 3+.

Why Is It Important for Students to Attend Tutoring Programs?

According to data from The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), as much as 44% of public school students are behind in at least one academic subject. This is likely to negatively impact their ability to stay on track with learning, score good grades on college exams, and continue their education. Meanwhile, tutoring provides a feasible solution to this problem.

Following are the specific advantages that tutoring programs bring to the students who attend them:

• Better academic performance
• Improved studying and organizational skills
• Higher confidence and self-motivation
• Focus on areas of special interest
• Acquisition of new learning methods and habits
• Personalized approach to students with special learning needs
• Higher results on standardized tests
• Reduced stress and pressure
• Better relationship with the educational system and the academic institution
• Encouragement of lifelong learning culture

With all these benefits that tutoring services can unleash, it’s crucial to motivate and encourage students to participate and attend sessions throughout the school year.

Let’s take a look at the 20 best techniques to do that:

1. Understand the Specific Reasons Behind Low Student Attendance

The first step in guaranteeing high student attendance in tutoring programs is to analyze the specific situation in your institution or district and find out the factors that are holding students back.

Some of the the main reasons why student attendance in tutoring programs might be lower than expected are:

• Unclear benefits of the tutoring services
• Irrelevant content and materials
• One-size-fit-all model which fails to meet the needs of many students
• Inconvenient tutoring schedule
• Unqualified tutors
• Boring tutoring sessions with overly repetitive activities
• Inadequate parent involvement
• Peer pressure and negative perception in the student body
• Feeling of failure as the reason behind the need for tutoring
• Barriers to access such as poor transportation options

To be able to adequately solve the problem in your school, you need to understand the precise reasons for low student engagement in tutoring as they are likely to vary from one institution to another. Then you can focus your efforts on addressing the specific factors prevalent in your school.

2. Send Personalized Invitations

A simple strategy that has proven highly effective in bringing individual students to available tutoring programs is drafting and sending personalized invitations to students who need additional support. While you can start with a general letter template, it’s important to customize the invitation to each student to highlight the benefits of the offered tutoring services in their specific situation  and how it will help them solve the exact challenges that they face in the learning process.

It’s crucial to use positive language that emphasizes the potential of the student and how the program helps unlock it. You should avoid any language that might make the student feel less qualified or less capable than their peers. Present tutoring as an opportunity and a privilege rather than an obligation.

3. Get Parents Involved

One of the main reasons why tutoring programs fail and students fall out of them is the lack of parent involvement. That’s why it’s important to get parents onboard right from the start. Parents are a driving force behind student behavior and performance so you should enlist their help in ensuring attendance.

A few things that you can do to get parents involved in the tutoring process is to help them comprehend the importance and the benefits of the tutoring program and to communicate regularly about their child’s progress. This will make parents truly appreciate the potential of tutoring and what it does for their kid and encourage them to motivate their child to continue attending.

In specific, you can also organize informational sessions and workshops for parents to understand the value of tutoring, to learn about the specific programs available at your school, and to connect with other parents whose children need additional support. This is in addition to designing informational leaflets and booklets for students to take home.

4. Craft Personalized Parent Letters

As part of getting parents involved in tutoring, you should send personalized letters to them as well to the students. You can draft these letters as agreements between the parents and the student, on one hand, and the school, on the other hand, where the parents and the student commit to regularly attending the sessions made available to them. This fosters a sense of accountability which is a major factor in boosting student attendance.

It’s recommended that you develop a few different versions of these letters based on the different groups of students to whom tutoring services are provided. You can create one draft for advanced students, another version for moderate achievers, and a mandatory tutoring letter for students that require additional support to get back on track.

5. Ensure School and Community Support

For a tutoring program to truly work and students to attend it regularly, it’s key to get the entire school community onboard. The selection of students who would benefit the most from tutoring services as well as the exact services that should be offered to address student needs has to be done in collaboration between teachers, counselors, school staff, and tutors. Each one of these groups can add a unique perspective in order to develop a highly effective program that is relevant to the situation in your particular school.

In addition, you can use the leverage of local community organizations and volunteers inside and outside the premises of your school to support and promote the tutoring program. Endorsement by trusted local actors can help gain the trust of students and parents and ensure strong participation.

6. Capitalize on Teacher Recommendations

Classroom teacher involvement is just as important as parent involvement for the success of a tutoring initiative. The majority of students trust their teachers as role models and are likely to pay attention to their recommendations.

To capitalize on this fact, you can ask classroom instructors to continuously stress the benefits of tutoring during class and to encourage different types of students to engage and attend. One particularly effective strategy is for teachers to share success stories of students whom they personally know who have been able to significantly improve their skills through tutoring and unlock opportunities that were previously unattainable.

7. Send Tutoring Session Reminders

One simple trick that can increase attendance significantly is sending short reminders before each tutoring session. While students do not generally forget about tutoring sessions as long as they happen at the same time each week, sometimes all they need is a small nudge to attend.

In the reminders, make sure to include a few bullet points on the topics and materials that will be covered each time as well as any special activities you might do. This can help get students excited and to remind them of the value that they gain with each session.

8. Launch Incentives and Rewards

In the current environment, young people appreciate and enjoy the gamification of just about anything, including learning and tutoring as part of the educational process. You can implement a reward system where students earn points or prizes with consistent participation. You can offer certificates, badges, and other awards that come with and recognize regular attendance.

There are various online platforms that can help you gamify the tutoring experience with readily available reward systems. Many of them offer special educator discounts for more affordable options for your school and tutors.

9. Start a Competition Among Students

Building on the previous idea, you can also launch a competition between students who attend tutoring programs to capitalize on their competitive spirit and further encourage regular participation.

For instance, you can track student attendance and recognize students who have taken part in most sessions. You can run a simple “Tutee of the Month” initiative where you reward the student who demonstrated the strongest participation and devotion or the student who marked the highest progress with a simple certificate.

10. Set Up Clear Goals and Track Progress Consistently

At the beginning of the tutoring program, it’s important to sit down with each student and set up clear, measurable, and achievable goals and objectives for their individual performance. You should also agree on a method to evaluate and track progress and then do that on a regular basis.

Once you have a progress tracking mechanism in place, share progress reports with both students and parents consistently to show them that tutoring is indeed working and achieving the desired outcomes. This will inspire and encourage students to continue attending as long as they are seeing results.

11. Provide Flexible Scheduling

When designing a tutoring program, you should take into account the need for flexibility and customization. One way to ensure that more students attend sessions regularly is to offer them at times that are convenient to students.

Try to offer tutoring sessions at various times including before and after school and during lunch breaks. Weekends are also a good time for many students as they might already struggle with keeping up with the workload throughout the week.

12. Offer Online Tutoring Programs

Another way to increase flexibility and attract attendance from more students is to provide online tutoring services. There are many online tutoring platforms that can offer services that are just as good as or even better than in-person tutoring. With online tutoring, you expand the pool of available qualified tutors and can find the right match for the needs of your students. Moreover, online tutors are more likely to be available at different times of the week and the day than tutors who need to physically attend sessions.

Fullmind provides online, synchronous, individualized tutoring to meet and exceed the needs of each student to help them reveal their full potential. State-certified educators have the capacity to target mandated IEPs, add knowledge and skill gaps to boost performance on state exams, and offer remediation and enrichment via one-on-one or small-group tutoring. 

13. Make Sure Content and Activities Are Relevant and Engaging

To maximize student attendance of tutoring programs, you need to ensure that sessions and materials are interactive, interesting, engaging, and motivating. Instead of following the exact same structure each and every time, diversify sessions by incorporating games, technology, and hands-on activities.

In addition, put efforts into tailoring the content to the needs, interests, and learning styles of individual students. Tutoring usually happens one-on-one or in small groups, so there’s plenty of room for personalized content and delivery. Students are more likely to continue attending tutoring sessions that address their specific needs and pain points and don’t simply turn into another unreachable series of instructions, like classroom teaching.

14. Create a Welcoming Environment

To motivate your students to want to keep coming back, you need to make them feel comfortable and welcomed to each session. Thus, you should work on fostering a positive, supportive, and collaborative environment where students feel valued, appreciated, and recognized. After all, many tutees are likely to be students who struggle academically and feel somewhat ashamed in the regular classroom setting, so your tutoring sessions need to act as a safe haven where they can enjoy understanding and support that allow them to thrive.

It’s important to install a culture of peer support and create opportunities for students to work together. Children can learn a lot from other children as they understand each other and have more similarities than with teachers and tutors.

15. Communicate Regularly

Effective, ongoing communication is a key factor for the success of a tutoring program and student attendance. You should put active effort into keeping both parents and students informed about upcoming sessions and topics, changes in the schedule, and new opportunities as well as student progress. Take each communication as an opportunity to remind students and parents of the most important benefits that come with tutoring.

To ensure that communication is effective and convenient for everyone, try to use a few different channels such as emails, phone calls, text messages, WhatsApp messages, and occasional in-person meetings.

16. Collect Feedback and Adapt Tutoring Accordingly

To ensure continuous relevance to the needs of students, you should establish mechanisms for getting feedback from students and parents and reflecting it in the structure of the tutoring program. Students are constantly learning and developing new skills, and the content and the schedule of tutoring services need to consider these dynamics. Your tutoring program will quickly become obsolete, even if it starts on the right footing, if it doesn’t evolve along with student needs and requirements.

Thus, you should use surveys, talk to parents and students, and track student progress to gather the data and information that you need to adjust the content and the structure of tutoring accordingly.

17. Build Connections Between Tutors and Students

Students are more likely to feel devoted to tutoring and to attend regularly if they are able to build connections with the tutors. They need to know that their tutor is someone that they can trust and rely on.

One of the most important aspects of building connections between tutors and tutees is having the same tutor each and every time. Children need this consistency for optimal results, so make sure to design the program in a way that allows the same tutor in the long run.

18. Make Tutoring Mandatory for At-Risk Students

While attending a tutoring program is largely optional in the vast majority of cases, it is worth considering making it obligatory for students who are really struggling academically or who are at risk of failing and dropping out. However, this has to be done in a way that is supportive to the students and their parents who are already facing challenges rather than in a way that feels intrusive and hostile.

You can involve the school psychologist, counselor, and college/career advisor to discuss the matter with at-risk students and their parents. Focus on the strong potential that tutoring has and the important benefits that it can bring to students by helping them catch up and even get ahead of peers.

19. Incorporate Social Elements

Although tutoring is a learning opportunity and process, it doesn’t have to be strictly limited to the academic realm. Indeed, you can integrate social activities such as group study sessions and field trips to make tutoring less formal and more enjoyable.

Many students are likely to appreciate the social aspect of your tutoring program even if they don’t particularly like the instructional and studying elements. Still, this might boost their attendance. So, try hosting occasional fun events and activities to build a sense of community and togetherness among tutees.

20. Create a Sense of Urgency and Scarcity

Finally, when announcing and promoting the tutoring program, you can try to create a sense of both urgency and exclusivity. Focus on the limited number of available spaces, highlight that seats are filling up quickly, and emphasize the need for immediate enrollment.

There is nothing wrong with presenting tutoring as a limited club opportunity that only a select group of students will have a chance to join. Once the program has been launched and is in full swing, continue working on its positive image and exclusive benefits to ensure continued student attendance.

Bottom Line

With these simple strategies, you can boost student attendance in tutoring programs. To maximize the efficiency of your tutoring services, make sure to get parents and the school community onboard from the get-to, continue highlighting the benefits that tutoring brings and the progress that individual students are achieving, and keep sessions relevant, interesting, useful, and engaging.

Meanwhile, if your school or district needs online, synchronous supplemental instruction by state-certified teachers, check out Fullmind.

In case your child requires one-on-one support by qualified educators, check out iTutor.