Attendance
Do I keep my child off school?
What if my child is ill?
Good attendance is something we teach the children from the outset in school as we believe it helps to develop good habits for life, as well as ensuring that children have every opportunity to reach their full learning potential. We promote good attendance throughout school, in weekly class briefings, assemblies, through whole school displays and celebrations.
However, we do also recognise that sometimes children do become ill and therefore unable to attend school. If your child is ill, please keep them at home until they are well enough to return to school. Please ring the school office before 9:00am on the first day of absence to inform us that your child is ill. This will then be recorded in the register as an ‘authorised absence’. If a reason hasn’t been received by the school, we will need to undertake a safe and well check telephone call to you. This ensures the safe arrival of all of our children, especially those who walk to school on their own.
If you are late, please come to the main entrance where we can ensure your child gets to class as quickly as possible. A record is kept of children who arrive at school late. Any child arriving after 8:45am, when the doors are closed are recorded as being late and will be coded as an ‘L’ in the register. If your child arrives late and after 9:15am, they go down in the register as a ‘U’ code – and therefore have an unauthorised absence for that session.
Any pupil whose attendance is below 90% is classed as a Persistent Absentee. We will contact you by letter if attendance falls to this level and will monitor the situation until it improves. This will hopefully resolve any difficulties and ensure children attend school on time every day.
If you do have any trouble getting your child to school on time every day, please do discuss this with me.
Can we go on holiday in term time?
School cannot authorise any holidays in term time. If you are choosing to take your child out of school for a holiday in term time, we need to know when your child will be absent from school, and request that you let us know by completing a ‘Withdrawal from Learning’ form, which is available from the school office.
Penalty Notices
If the school refuses your application and you still withdraw your child from school, the absences will be treated as unauthorised. If the school has evidence that a parent/carer has removed a child from school for the purposes of a holiday during term time without authorisation and the level of absence is 5 days (10 sessions) or more in total over a 10 week rolling period, then the Local Authority will issue Penalty Notices to each parent/carer for each child to whom unauthorised absence applies or a Summons for irregular school attendance.
If you believe there is an exceptional reason why your child needs to be out of school, please ring or complete a form with the reasons for the absence, and this will be looked at in line with our policy.
Please try to make all dentist, doctors, opticians’ appointments etc. out of school time.
If, however appointments do have to take place on a school day, it is worth noting, that children will still receive a ‘present’ mark as long as they are here for morning registration or afternoon registration (15 minutes at the start of morning or afternoon sessions). They can leave for their appointment and return straight afterwards. This helps to keep your child’s attendance as high as possible.
Please see our whole school attendance leaflet for further information on our attendance policies and procedures.