When I first started teaching, I used to reprimand tardy students and tell them, “You’re late!”. Nowadays, I ask, “Are you OK?”.
The Lord of the Rings is still the best thing I have ever watched on the telly. Not that new Amazon TV series tripe, I am talking about the Peter Jackson trilogy. The scenery, the music, the words, the Fellowship… hobbits, elves and dwarves…
For me, the grey wizard Gandalf has all the best lines:
“You shall not pass.”
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
And my favourite, the one he mischievously throws at Frodo when accused of being late to visit the Shire:
A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.
Even if I didn’t fully understand it at the time, the line resonated with me. Maybe, I thought, I too could throw it out the next time someone told me, “You’re late!”.
It’s a line that comes to my mind whenever a teacher asks me what to do when a kid is late for class. The question is usually asked with an edge of irritation, as if the lateness is a personal slight. “They have to be on time, right? They have to be in school, right?” What they’re really asking is: What punishment should we use to get them compliant?
The problem is they’re asking the wrong questions.
One Does Not Simply…
To be fair, schools didn’t set out to make attendance about compliance. The research on good attendance is compelling. There is a strong correlation between being in school and achieving better outcomes (against most measures). Of course, we wanted children in school and in class. So we measured it.
Then we set targets. Then we reported on it. Then we added interventions. Then sanctions to enforce them.
And somewhere along the way, attendance stopped being about belonging and became about compliance. The irony is that the very students who most need to feel drawn into school are the ones who end up feeling most alienated by the system designed to bring them in. Compliance was never the point.
Speak, Friend, and Enter
Children often open up if we say the right words.
My advice to colleagues is simple: be curious, not judgemental. Be curious about the reasons why they might be late, or not at school. Don’t judge before you understand what’s going on. Most of the time it’s very little — and when it is something, it matters.
Put more simply: turn exclamation marks into question marks.
- “You’re late!” → “Are you OK?”
- “This is the second time this week!” → “What’s changed this week?”
- “You are falling behind!” → “What do you need right now to feel on track?”
This is how we should treat attendance.
Exclamations judge. Questions listen.
There and Back Again
It’s true — we measure attendance because it matters. But when the metric becomes the mission, when numbers start to displace people, and reports and percentages become more important than conversations and relationships, we are going the wrong way.
We need to come “back again” to belonging, to presence, to the original purpose of attendance.
Students, not numbers, sit in classrooms. So when we fixate on the numbers, we end up managing absence instead of cultivating belonging. And the students who most need to feel drawn in are the ones who feel most punished by the very system designed to help them.
The way back isn’t fewer expectations. It’s better questions.
The Gandalf Test
This is where Gandalf’s line helps me think differently. His claim isn’t really about timekeeping; it’s about intention. A wizard arrives “precisely when he means to.”
What if that became our test for attendance?
I want students to be in school because they want to be, not because they have to be.
Think of two students:
- One arrives every day at 0800hrs on the dot, driven only by fear of punishment. They’re compliant, yes, but are they present in any meaningful way?
- Another slips through the gate at 0823hrs. The bus was late. Their mum was finishing a night shift. They had to get their siblings ready. They’re tired, hungry, but they’re here. Isn’t there resilience in that? Isn’t that a success worth noticing?
The Gandalf Test asks us to see attendance not as the triumph of compliance but as the triumph of belonging.
Are students arriving on purpose?
The Fellowship
In the end, attendance is not really about registers, any more than punctuation is really about grammar drills. Both are about meaning.
The exclamation mark says: “Stop. I’m done. Case closed.”
The question mark says: “There’s more here. Keep listening.”
If we want schools to be places that students enter with intention (not because they fear the sanction) but because they feel they belong, then we need to trade some of our exclamation marks for question marks.
That’s what true fellowship in a school looks like…students arriving not just on time but on purpose.
Gandalf knows this.
A wizard is never late because he arrives precisely when he means to.
Our task is to build schools where students can say the same.
Serendipities 