Attendance

From August 2024, the Department for Education released its statutory guidance -‘Working Together to Improve Attendace’ This document outlines the new regulations regarding attendance in schools.

As part of our preparations for these new guidelines we have developed an attendance strategy. The aims of this strategy are to:

• Increase the school’s overall attendance. Our target is to develop an expectation of regular school attendance. In other words, that each child attends every single day.
• Promote an understanding of the need for good school attendance across the whole school community.
• Reduce the number of children with persistent absence (below 90%) through clarity of expectation, effective support and adherence to policy. We will continue to offer support to vulnerable families to help promote better attendance for all children.
• Promote effective inter agency work. This includes the use of the Education Welfare Officers and Social Workers to develop action plans.

There are clear links between high attendance and better outcomes – click here to read the DfE articles sharing this research.  

As a school, when we meet with teachers to discuss individual pupil progress, we also correlate this against a child’s attendance. From next term, Mrs Long (Deputy Headteacher – Teaching, Learning and Assessment) will be inviting parents in to meet with her to share the direct impact that lower attendance is having on their child’s outcomes.

A key part of our attendance strategy is to reward good attendance. Please find below examples of how we will be rewarding good attendance this academic year.

• Weekly celebration message will be sent to all children / parents with over 95% attendance
• An attendance trophy will be awarded in celebration worship each week to the class with the best weekly attendance
• A reward of an extra playtime and an individual certificate to any class achieving 100% attendance for a whole week.
• Stickers given out each week to pupils achieving 100% attendance

We recognise that it is not always possible to achieve 100% attendance, and as such, our attendance strategy also rewards pupils for achieving 96% or more.

We are introducing Attendance Heroes. Every 3 weeks we will put the name of every child who has attendance of 96% or more into a prize draw. Our Head Pupils will draw out 2 winners (one for years R – 2 and one for years 3-6) in our Celebration Worship. The winners will receive a £10 Amazon voucher.

Our attendance strategy (link below) also outlines the support and actions that we will take should any attendance begin to fall below 95%.