Attendance monitoring is not punishment; it is infrastructure for learning

Across UK higher education, and particularly in college-based provision delivering university-level business courses, we are seeing a quietly significant shift in who sits in our classrooms. More of our students are returners: adults who left education at some earlier point, took different paths, and have come back to study often supported by Student Finance maintenance loans that, for many, are not a top-up but the household income. 

This is, in many ways, a success story for widening participation. It is also an invitation for the sector to think carefully about what engagement looks like for this group, and what role the wider institution can play in supporting it alongside the work that already happens in the classroom. 

A different motivational starting point 

Self-determination theory offers a useful lens. Ryan and Deci (2020) describe a continuum of student motivation, from autonomous forms (genuine interest in the subject, identification with the value of study) to more externally regulated forms (attending because attendance is required, or because financial support depends on enrolment). The autonomous end of the continuum is consistently the stronger predictor of sustained engagement, depth of learning, and persistence; a recent meta-analysis of 344 studies confirms this pattern across educational contexts (Howard et al., 2021). The external end, while perfectly legitimate, tends to be more fragile under pressure. 

None of this is a criticism of returning students. The decision to come back to study while managing work, family, and financial pressures is itself an act of considerable autonomous motivation, and one that the sector should celebrate. But once that decision is made, the day-to-day reality is that many returning students are operating with very thin margins. A missed shift, a childcare gap, or a quiet financial worry can shift the lived experience of study from “I want to be in this seminar” toward “I need to remain enrolled.” That gentle drift, from intrinsic engagement toward maintaining the conditions for the loan, is worth our collective attention. 

Recent qualitative work by Jones and Bell (2024) with UK undergraduates describes students as “squeezed left, right and centre” by competing economic and social pressures, engaging tactically rather than within a coherent academic identity. The picture they paint is not one of disengaged students; it is one of students whose engagement is having to compete with a great deal else. 

What this means for those of us in the classroom 

As an educator, I have come to think that the question “how do I make my teaching more engaging?”, while always worth asking, is not the only question we should be asking. Pedagogy matters enormously, and most lecturers I know invest considerable energy in it. But Ryan and Deci (2020) are explicit that teacher motivational style is itself shaped by the wider institutional environment. They observe that teachers “are themselves impacted and constrained by controlling mandates, institutional pressures, and leadership styles.” 

In practical terms, this means that even a thoroughly engaging session can find the room thinner than expected when other parts of the institutional ecosystem are quiet. A student who is not present this week may not have made an active choice to miss the session; they may simply have had a competing pressure, and nothing else in their week gently signalled that this hour mattered. For the returning, financially-stretched student in particular, those small institutional signals a friendly check-in email, a phone call after a second absence, a tutor following up early rather than late can make a meaningful difference. 

This is not, I want to stress, a suggestion that responsibility for engagement sits anywhere other than where it has always sat: shared between the student, the educator, and the institution. It is an observation that for this growing cohort of returning students, the institutional contribution to that shared responsibility has become more important than it perhaps was before. 

What good practice already looks like 

It is genuinely encouraging that many UK institutions have already begun to articulate this institutional role explicitly. The University of Dundee’s attendance and engagement policy, for example, sets a clear 80% threshold for centrally timetabled teaching, with automated supportive alerts to students at 7 and 14 days of below-threshold engagement (University of Dundee, 2024). The University of West London operates a comparable two-stage system, framing early contact as a route to support rather than as a disciplinary step (University of West London, 2024). 

What I find valuable in these models is not the monitoring itself but the underlying assumption: that knowing how a student is engaging, and reaching out warmly when something seems off, is institutional work  administrative, pastoral, and central  rather than something that can be quietly added to the day of an already busy module leader. These institutions seem to me to be saying, in effect, that the educator’s job is to teach a brilliant session, and the institution’s job is to ensure the conditions are in place for as many students as possible to be in the room when they do. 

Holding the financial reality in view 

There is a reasonable concern that needs to be acknowledged honestly. UK higher education is operating under significant financial pressure, and student recruitment and retention are central to institutional sustainability. Investing in attendance and engagement infrastructure, particularly in college-based provision where margins are often tightest, is not a small ask. The 2025 Chartered ABS Annual Membership Survey captures the scale of this clearly: 48% of responding schools reported a fall in income for 2024/25, financial sustainability has become the sector’s top strategic priority, and many institutions have had to absorb voluntary redundancies, recruitment freezes, and restructuring during the year. 

I am not suggesting institutions are unaware of this tension. They navigate it daily. What I would gently suggest is that, over a longer horizon, the kind of supportive institutional infrastructure described above tends to compound positively: returning students who feel held by the institution are more likely to complete, more likely to recommend the experience to others, and more likely to become the alumni who sustain the next cycle of recruitment. Engagement work is not in opposition to recruitment; it is, over time, one of the things that makes recruitment durable. 

A few questions for the sector 

Rather than ending with prescriptions, which feels presumptuous from someone relatively new to this conversation, I would offer three questions that I have found myself sitting with, and that might be worth others sitting with too. 

First, when we design our engagement and attendance processes, are we designing them with the returning, financially-stretched student in mind, or with the traditional school-leaver as the implicit reference point? The two cohorts may need different things. 

Second, where in our institution does the work of noticing, gently, when a student has gone quiet currently sit? Is that placement still the right one, given who our students now are? 

Third, how do we talk to students themselves about why their engagement matters  in language that connects to their own goals and learning, rather than only to compliance with funding conditions? 

These are not questions with easy answers, and they will look different in different institutions. But for the returning student, who has made a brave choice to come back, I think they are questions worth asking. The sector’s growing interest in how we support this cohort is precisely the reason I wanted to share these reflections, and I would welcome others’ thoughts. 

References 

Chartered Association of Business Schools (2025) Results from the 2025 Chartered ABS Annual Membership Survey: Financial sustainability becomes the top priority for business schools. London: Chartered ABS. 

Howard, J. L., Bureau, J. S., Guay, F., Chong, J. X. Y. & Ryan, R. M. (2021) Student motivation and associated outcomes: A meta-analysis from self-determination theory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(6), 1300–1323. 

Jones, C. S. & Bell, H. (2024) Under increasing pressure: A systematic literature review of factors affecting UK undergraduates with consideration of engagement, belonging, alienation, and resilience. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education. 

Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2020) Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101860. 

University of Dundee (2024) Taught Programmes: Student attendance and engagement policy. 

University of West London (2024) Student attendance and engagement monitoring policy and procedure.