Attendance and Learning Matters

What do we do to prevent absences and support removal of barriers to attending school or accessing education?

So that we can prevent students falling into PA or SA (persistent or severe absentee) categories we monitor all attendance.  This enables us to identify students early who may need support to remove barriers to them attending school. 

This includes having early conversations with you (and your child if old enough) and meeting with you to discuss absences, even if they are authorised absences, as all absence must be explored in line with the above statutory duties.  The actions taken to explore, support or consider legal actions will depend on the reasons for absence e.g., an absence for a 2-week hospital admission, would be treated differently to a 2-week holiday, or 1 of week Chicken Pox would be treated differently to 1 or 2 days per week over a few weeks.

We also promote having good attendance by ensuring that you and your child has information about their attendance level.  We do this in newsletters, and information around school as well as discussions and assemblies.  This helps to raise awareness of how they are doing, how important it is to come to school and what to do if it feels less easy for them.  We frequently recognise effort to achieve good attendance, not just 100% awards as we feel it is important to recognise that some barriers to attending are not chosen or the fault of the child or family.

Our visual roadmap of process here

What can you do to help your child maintain a high level of attendance?

There are several things you can do:

• Support your child to attend every day, on time, equipped and ready to learn.
• Ensure you request all planned absence in advance, and only do so for absence that can be demonstrated as exceptional circumstances – plan family trips, holidays, or events outside of term time.   
• Ensure you notify us as soon as possible in the case of unplanned absence e.g., an emergency or illness. Please see above contacts for absence.
• Where possible, arrange health appointments at times that prevent absence from the AM or PM registration points.  Signing out to go to appointments and then signing back into school is a good option, if after school or holiday time appointments cannot be arranged.   NB. We do understand it may not always be possible to avoid and we encourage you to share any supportive information with us where it’s not, as it helps us to keep our register coding sympathetic and accurate.
• Encourage and reinforce positive thinking about school and its importance, with the understanding that regular attendance means attending every day the school is open unless an exceptional or statutory reason applies, as detailed above. 
• Talk openly about school and/or any worries that occur to build self-awareness, encourage problem solving skills and boost confidence to know it is normal to be worried about things, but that we can help ourselves by sharing those worries with others.   
• Contact your child’s tutor/class teacher if you are having trouble in getting your child to attend or if there are things affecting their learning or happiness at school.  Prevention is generally better than attempting to cure later.
• Proactively engage with support to enable the removal of barriers to attendance and education and ensure we have up to date contact information for you in case of emergency. 

Further details about government policy and advice on this matter is available help-with-getting-your-child-to-go-to-school