To not understand the fixation on attendance?

For those parents who really don't value education at all, I think that insisting their children have 97%+ attendance makes bugger all difference to the child's academic outcome.

I agree that schools put pressure on Sen parents hoping that they will eventually withdraw their child and home educate or find another school.

I think the trouble is a lot of these cases are people with SEN DC and all our energy goes into trying to get them the support they are entitled to. I don't have the time, money or energy to take the school to court over attendance. I think the school is just trying to get rid of my daughter, but I'm not going to let them do that.

They should be marked as authorised absense

Somebody needs to use the Equality Act and take them to court as playing nice obviously doesnt work

I have been through child’s attendance records with a fine tooth comb now and realised that every time she has an appointment like medical etc, she is marked off. So all the CAMHs, dental appointments (which I can’t very well insist on having outside school hours) are taken out of the school attendance.

Is dem the rules then?

@Justrolledmyeyesoutloud

I did think about it but there had no uniforms and we have 20/30 schools a day so I couldn't easily work out who there were.

I feel bad now. I wish I had asked.

Can you complain to the school? Poor lad.

Yes, very true. My DD has Long COVID and gets ill with everything. She gets very depressed having to stay in bed and not see her friends. And it is bullying. That's exactly how I would describe the LA attendance person - just tried to bully and belittle me.

And kids' mental health too- my son was very worried about missing so much school, he loves school and has good grades. I think it's totally unacceptable to send attendance letters if the child is at home practically unable to walk from bad flu.. it's basically bullying children when they're sick.

The amount of stress these attendance people cause is likely to make attendance worse not better by affecting the parents' mental health.

What I hate is that it discriminates against kids who are having health problems. My son had flu and repeated ear and chest infections during one school term, and the panic about missing 4 weeks of school in total was worse than the illnesses.

Unmet SEN is a separate issue, I agree. However, most unauthorised absence in the schools I've come across has been for holidays.

Complete opposite here. We have on average about 4 kids out of 30 that go on holidays during term time. The vast majority of them are rarely off otherwise so their attendance by the end of summer term is not actually that bad.

The ones that do have actual poor attendance tend to be kids with SEND, SEMH issues , issues at home or a mix of all of the above.

I was at work today. I work in a tourist attraction.

A teacher was really shouting at a poor teenager Who I expect had adhd. I felt so bad for him. The teacher was humiliating him in ground of the whole class and then the general public. I nearly stepped in. I later saw the poor boy further in the attraction so I'm glad
He got in.

The teacher was a bully and clearly couldn't handle a child with adhd without resorting to Controlling bullying techniques.

It's not just undiagnosed SEN. It's diagnosed SEN but needs not being met. Complete lack of understanding of SEN by the attendance bod at the LA.

I don't know how significant it is but for my DD the other issue is Long COVID. And absolutely no support for it. And the LA attendance person having no understanding of that either!

I mean honestly if the Education secretary wants to understand anything they need to start by having some people who have a clue in the attendance department!

I would expect a fixation on attendance by the Department for Education, because it serves as a measurable barometer, and aids obtaining the necessary deeper understanding of the multiple causes of it, enabling new policies to be developed.

The new Education Secretary is likely wanting to understand:

• How many children are likely missing school due to neglectful and/ or disengaged parents and what can be done to improve it.
• How many children are missing school due to mental health problems, undiagnosed SEN etc and what can be done to improve it, including ensuring their needs can be better met.
• How many children are not in school due to family holidays, the cost of family holidays, the timing etc and what can be done about it.

Ultimately, children who are not at school are not learning. Their absence has an impact - on them, on their families, on the teaching staff. Non attendance has gone through the roof for a myriad of reasons, and it's the sitting government's job to understand the reasons and put in place a variety of measures to address it.

I say all of this as a parent of a SEN child who has experienced two significant bouts of school avoidance. The impact on our family was huge. If scrutiny of children's absence leads to a greater depth of understanding and supportive measures, then I'm all for it. The Tories used it as a stick to beat both parents and teachers. I'm hopeful that this government will take a different approach.

Unmet SEN is a separate issue, I agree. However, most unauthorised absence in the schools I've come across has been for holidays.

This is definitely a problem and certainly does affect life chances. And if you do have SEN or EBSA, no one seems to give a flying foxtrot about the attendance.

I know from my experience that children feel crap about not attending school. They miss their friends and social life and feel rubbish about themselves. What is it about schools nowadays which results in a situation where a huge percentage are missing so much? Is there a mismatch between what’s provided and what’s required?

Exactly, we're not all swanning off to Disney!

My DD is one with unmet needs due to her SEN. The attendance person at the LA can lecture me all she likes but it won't make a blind bit of difference. I've been advised by my GP, the school nurse and the SEN department at the LA to just ignore them. But that's easier said than done!

But this assumes that low attendance is due to the majority of parents taking their children out for a two week holiday to Disneyland or similar, most low attendance is due to unmet Sen. More and more complex children are being pushed into mainstream with no support and as you say the school don’t have the funding to support. It is supposed to take 20 weeks for ehcp assessment which is long enough but a lot of councils are running at double this plus more, add in tribunal which is currently taking 10 months and it can be years before a child gets the support in place they need to be able to attend school. If a child with unmet Sen needs goes to school with no support they will improve the absense statistics but they really won’t be improving their grades. In fact we see thread after thread on here where people are moaning about an Sen child in their kids class who is disrupting the learning of the whole class and the posters moan that the parents should remove the child from school as it’s not fair, plus comments about the child needing to go to a special school. The last government were very much divide and conquer by putting the blame on parents for anything to distract from their own short comings

Not always no, however in the case of attendance it really does make sense. When children miss a lot of school they have gaps, these are difficult to catch up on for many children and always show when it comes to assessment etc. For example, if you miss 2 weeks of school that's probably two different units of maths. Unfortunately, schools often simply don't have the resources to properly dedicate to help children catch up after a trip to Disney or the likes.

Correlation does not equal causation

Tories and Labour Two cheeks of the same arse

We used to call attendance awards "lucky health prizes"

My DD is 10, always likes to be in school and she's only been off when properly sick (temperature, vomiting). The letters our school send seem a bit harsh - we had one at the end of the Autumn term saying her percentage (which I later realised was based on the whole year to come, not the days that had taken place so far) and how she needed to attend or we would be called in to discuss it. I think she'd missed three days with two illnesses that term. I was having a pretty shit mental health episode and felt like they would be involving social services and she would be taken away (I have autism, ADHD and RSD, I can catastrophise). It all seemed a bit heavy, the tone of the letter was quite threatening. It just made me send her in when she was ill out of fear of things getting worse, and they just called me to get her anyway.