School dropout is seldom caused by a single event. The road to dropout is a process that takes place over time. Students often exhibit warning signs of problems that may lead to them dropping out.

Creative’s Attend uses a framework to capture negative patterns of behavior – absenteeism, disengaged or disruptive behavior, weak academic performance – that put students in danger of dropping out. These warning signs then trigger activities to support at-risk students and halt the course of dropout. By alerting school personnel and parents that certain students are at-risk, Attend enables school staff to establish early response strategies that can be used to support at-risk students in specific ways to stem dropout.

Attend is implemented at the school level by school personnel, families and communities working together, with oversight by the local education authorities of the Ministry of Education. It is both a framework and process that uses information and resources readily available in schools and communities to identify and support students at-risk of school dropout.

At the core of Creative’s Attend are the globally recognized predictors of dropout—attendance, behavior and coursework (the ABCs)—used to identify at-risk students. Central to the success of Attend is a committed effort on the part of school personnel to monitor and track indicators linked to these predictors to create a safety net for at-risk students. Recognizing that it is not the sole responsibility of the school to prevent school dropout, Attend supports families, schools and communities to work together. 

Creative’s Attend is designed and tailored to local contexts and can be implemented in almost any environment, developed or developing, to help students at risk of dropping out.