Attendance
Attendance at St. Crispin’s Infant School
Working Together to Improve School Attendance 2022 (Department for Education 2022)
Improving attendance is everyone’s business. The barriers to accessing education are wide and complex, both within and beyond the school gates, and are often specific to individual pupils and families. The foundation of securing good attendance is that school is a calm, orderly, safe, and supportive environment where all pupils want to be and are keen and ready to learn.
The law entitles every child of compulsory school age to an efficient, full-time education suitable to their age, aptitude, and any special educational need they may have. It is the legal responsibility of every parent to make sure their child receives that education either by attendance at a school or by education otherwise than at a school.
Where parents decide to have their child registered at school, they have an additional legal duty to ensure their child attends that school regularly. This means their child must attend every day that the school is open, except in a small number of allowable circumstances such as being too ill to attend or being given permission for an absence in advance from the school.
What we do to promote good attendance at St. Crispin’s Infant School
As a school we are expected to proactively manage and improve attendance across our school community.
We do this by:
- Promoting the importance and benefits of good attendance e.g. via newsletters, assemblies and in-class work.
- Having a clear attendance policy which can be understood by all. This is shared to families when they are new to school.
- Regularly monitoring and analysing attendance to identify pupils or cohorts that require support with their attendance and put effective strategies in place.
- Building strong relationships with families, listen to and understand barriers to attendance and work with families to remove them.
- Sharing information and work collaboratively with other schools in the area, local authorities, and other partners when absence is at risk of becoming persistent
Persistent and severe absence
Where pupil absence exceeds 10% of expected school time, the school will seek to put in place strategies to help improve attendance. This will include letters to families, conversations over the phone and face to face to seek solutions to low attendance. These could include support for parenting, part time timetables or external agency support.
Children who miss over 50% of school are likely to need more intensive support and we would seek the support of the SLO at Kent County Council.