Our children's attendance is vitally important in supporting our children to achieve their potential. Children gain a huge amount from attending school regularly, including greater relationships with their friends, good socialisation, maintenance of a healthy mental wellbeing and holistic development including academic ability. Studies show that children who have an attendance rate lower than 95.7% are less likely to meet the expected standard at the end of Key Stage Two. This means that these children are less likely to be secondary ready and in a position to reach their full potential.

We will continue to recognise good attendance through a variety of strategies for example, additional SMART merits for the best attending house and recognition of outstanding or improved attendance.

Where children's attendance begins to fall, we will work with our parents to try to understand why and if we can support them with this. In context, if a child's attendance is 90%, this is the equivalent of missing a whole school day every 2 weeks and will equate to missing 19 days over the school year. This could mean they are missing 95 lessons which can have a severe consequence on that child's ability to reach their potential. 

From September 2024, the Working together to improve school attendance guidance will be apply which has a few key changes. The most notable for parents is regarding Fixed Penalty Notices for children's holidays. If a child has 5 days of unauthorised absence in a 10 week period, both parents will be issued with a Penalty Notice fine. If the child has another period of 5 days of unauthorised absence within 3 years of the first, a second Penalty Notice fine will be issued to both parents. If a third period of 5 days of unauthorised absence is taken within 3 years of the first, this will then progress to other legal attendance interventions.

Please see below the Attendance newsletters that give more information about this. The Attendance Policy can be found in the policies section of our website. For more information about the DfE guidance on this, please click here.