Attendance at Ascot Road School

Here at Ascot Road Primary, we are continually striving for excellence in all areas, including our school attendance. Children are regularly spoken to about how important good attendance is and the need to be at school on time every day. Within school, our pupils will continue to think about our Attendance HEROs (Here Everyday Ready On Time) who will try and help to continue with our attendance this year. As a school, we are constantly working towards our goal of 95% attendance and high attendance will be celebrated each week in assembly. We want the children of our school to have the best learning experience possible and for this to happen we expect great attendance.

The Government continue to make it explicitly clear to schools and parents that attendance is very much mandatory and that children should be attending school, regularly, from the very beginning of the year. Where there is an absence from school, our team will take itsusual measures to explore and where necessary challenge this. We need to continue to work hard to raise and maintain our school attendance and we will be continuing to ensure that our pupils are at school when they can, receiving the education they deserve. 

As a school, our work on attendance is guided by the statutory guidance ‘Working Together to Improve School Attendance’ (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance ). This guidance makes clear to schools that we should be supporting and challenging any poor attendance and looking for ways to help children and families improve their attendance at school.

Impact of Absence

We know and strongly believe here that children who are attending school regularly and on time are accessing their learning to the fullest capacity and are having the best chance possible to be successful within their education. If a child is absent, even if for just 1 day, it has huge implications on their learning, meaning that they are having to spend time catching up on missed work. Below is the chart we have displayed in school which clearly communicates how many hours of learning are missed should children be absent from school. 

We strongly encourage parents and carers to make any appointments for their child outside of the school day as any time off school will mean that a child will have missed a valuable lesson. NO holiday during term time will be authorised. Only families with very exceptional circumstances may be granted authorised leave from school and this will always be down to the Head teacher’s discretion. If your child’s attendance falls below 90%, then you will be expected to attend a meeting with a Senior Member of the school, to ascertain the reasons for absence and support that needs to be put in place moving forward.

 

Attendance during 1 school year	Equals – days absent	Which is approximately weeks absent	Which means this number of lessons missed
95%	9 days	2 weeks	50 lessons
90%	19 days	4 weeks	100 lessons
85%	29 days	6 weeks	150 lessons
80%	38 days	8 weeks	200 lessons
75%	48 days	10 weeks	250 lessons
70%	57 days	11.5 weeks	290 lessons
65%	67 days	13.5 weeks	340 lessons

 

Penalty Notice Fines

To ensure that our expectations of attendance are kept high, we will be issuing Fixed Penalty Notices for families where any of the criteria below has been met. A Fixed Penalty Notice comes with a charge of £80 per child, per adult in each family unit. We hope that we would never have to be in a position where a Fixed Penalty Notice would have to be issued to any family. In order to avoid this, please attempt to provide documentation to support your child’s absence. NO holiday during term time will be authorised and is strongly discouraged. 

 

Reporting an absence due to sickness

If your child cannot attend school due to illness you can report this through Studybugs or by contacting the school office.  This needs to be completed before the start of school wherever possible. 

Studybugs also gives valuable medical advice from symptoms entered. We recommend all parents download and use this app. Once registered you will be able to log in and tell us whenever your child is ill.  Please provide specific symptoms your child is experiencing e.g. 'stomach cramps', 'vomiting' or 'high temperature and coughing' instead of 'poorly', 'sick' or 'unwell'.

Diarrhoea and Vomiting Absence

Diarrhoea and/or vomiting commonly affects children and staff and can be caused by a number of different germs, including viruses, parasites and bacteria. Infections can be easily spread from person to person (by unwashed hands), especially in children. In general, it is recommended that any staff member or child with diarrhoea and/or vomiting symptoms must stay away or be excluded from the school or early years setting until they have been free of symptoms for 48 hours (the ‘48 hour rule’) and feel well. Personal hygiene whilst ill must be very strict.

If your child is sick at school, we will ask you or your emergency contact to take your child home. They should not return for 24 hours. We appreciate that this is inconvenient in many cases, and you may not believe your child is ill, but you will appreciate that we do this in all cases and it should reduce the risk of infection for all children in school.  As an example, if your child is sick at lunchtime on a Tuesday, they should not return to school until after lunch on Thursday, provided there have not been any further episodes of vomiting.