Attendance

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.

Working together to improve school attendance, DfE 2022

Attendance expectations at Abbey View

We want all our pupils to have excellent attendance so they can benefit from the teaching, curriculum, wider experiences and social opportunities that we are providing.

We are acutely aware of the DfE statistics that demonstrate that pupils who achieve well at school are noted to have higher levels of attendance than those who do not and want all Abbey View pupils to achieve to the best of their ability.

We are also aware that excellent attendance is a protective factor for pupils who are vulnerable.

We therefore expect parents to support regular attendance at school for their child except in exceptional circumstances such as illness which means they are unable to safely attend school and medical appointments that cannot be scheduled outside of school time.

When a child is too unwell for school

This can be a difficult decision to make. With some illnesses it is very clear. However, with general coughs, colds and viruses it can be more complicated. A good guide is that if they are struggling to stay awake or are running a temperature, they should be staying at home. Otherwise, send them to school and we will certainly contact you if they are struggling.

There is some guidance here from the NHS which clearly outlines when children should be kept off school for particular conditions: NHS Guidance

The most common illnesses that you may want information on are listed below:

Vomiting or diarrhoea- your child must stay at home until 48 hours have passed since the last incident
Chicken pox- your child must stay at home until the spots have started to scab over
Headlice- children can be in school but should be treated as soon as possible
Conjunctivitis- children can be in school but should be treated as soon as possible

Attendance for Children with Medical Conditions or Disabilities

We understand that some children will have lower attendance rates due to medical conditions (including mental health) or disabilities that require regular treatment or medical appointments and that some of these children will also have more days when they are too unwell to attend school. We endeavour to work closely with these families to support regular attendance and get the best outcomes for the child, providing any reasonable adjustments that may be needed. In cases where parents are telling us that low attendance is related to a medical need, we will contact the GP practice for confirmation.

Monitoring Attendance

The attendance of our pupils is regularly monitored. Registers are taken at 8.55am and after lunch daily. Any children who are not able to attend that day, should be reported to the office by parents before 9am.

Reporting absence-

01494 939830 (choose option 2 and leave a message)
office@avpa.school (use Absence in the subject line)

Any child who we do not have a reason for absence for, will have a text sent to parents notifying them of their absence and asking for a reason. This allows us to ensure that children are safe and parents are aware that they are not in school.

The overall attendance in the academy and the individual attendance of pupils is regularly monitored by staff:

Ms Mirza (Principal)
Mrs Paice (Academy Secretary)

Supporting improved attendance

Parents are able to view their child's attendance in the School Gateway app. If you need assistance with the app, please contact the school office. We also communicate individual attendance figures at Parents' Evenings and on the child's annual report, and mention attendance in our half-termly newsletters to parents. Relationships with parents are very important to our academy and the success of the children, and we will in the first instance try to work with parents where a pattern of poor attendance is emerging. This is in order to see if there are any barriers to attendance that we may be able to support with.

We work closely with Buckinghamshire Council on improving the attendance of pupils. Where a pupil has been identified as having persistent absence, we follow the Buckinghamshire guidance. Please see the flowchart below.

As you can see from the flow chart, the process involves:

Notification letters
Parent meetings
Parent contracts
Offers of additional support.

Where all other voluntary support has not resulted in improved attendance, legal intervention may be necessary to enforce it.

Attendance rewards

We feel strongly that rewarding individual attendance has to be handled very carefully as it can easily become a discriminatory practice for pupils of different religions and pupils with medical conditions and disabilities.

Therefore we have limited our attendance rewards to the following class-based rewards: