Attendance

We firmly believe that regular attendance at school is crucial in raising standards of education and ensuring that every child meets their full potential.  Missing out on lessons leaves children vulnerable to falling behind.  We place a great emphasis on attendance in order to ensure that:

• every child has access to the full-time education that they are entitled to
• we act early to recognise patterns of absence
• we maintain high levels of attendance and reduce the amount of persistence absence.

We have introduced several initiatives to highlight the importance of attending school.  These are outlined below:

• A class acheiving 100% attendance for a full week at school will be rewarded with a non-uniform day on the following Monday.
• Each week the class with the highest attendance is presented with the attendance bear in assembly.
• All children who achieve 100% attendance will be rewarded with a visit at the end of the year.
• Mrs Doherty and Mrs Dolan (Parent Governor) analyse the school attendance data on a half termly basis and identify children who have lower than 90% attendance.  The parents of these children will be invited into school to discuss this.  This is an opportunity to identify any issues or problems that may be preventing the child attending school.  Often the school will work alongside the Legal Intervention Team in this matter.

We are fully aware that children do become ill and often have appointments that are within the school day.  The purpose of these initiatives is not to punish these children but to avoid having children staying off school unnecessarily or to stay off for longer than is needed.  These initiatives have had an extremely positive impact on our attendance data.  

Our latest data shows that these initiatives are having an excellent impact on our attendance.  The attendance for the academic year 2017/18 was 95.9%. 

Lateness also has a big impact on your child's education.  The school policy is that registers open at 8:55am and close at 9:30, this follows advice from the local authority.  Children who arrive in school after the register has closed will be marked as an unauthorised absence for that session.  Children who arrive late, but before the register is closed, will be marked as "late" but will still receive their mark.