Schools putting pressure on students for good attendance.

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Secondary schools! I get it, they want children to have good attendance, I don’t disagree but my sons school read out their attendance level in form time and discuss it in front of others and get told to do better.

ds is in mainstream secondary, he is also autistic and needs to be moved to a SEN school but not enough places where I live. He’s doing okay in secondary socially but academically very delayed.he is high masking at school and eager to please so really worries about his attendance.

anyway, ds’s attendance has dropped to 70 something percent! Let me explain…

2 days this year he’s been sent home by the school as ds was too anxious and was in emotional shut down and they couldn’t meet his needs. He behaves at school but struggles still.

last month he had a chest infection. He was really poorly, 40 temp, of food, fatigue and on antibiotics. He was so ill and had the whole week off. He was weak and couldn’t possibly go in.

he’s also had 3 hospital appointments. Right in the middle of the day and hospital is an hour away so missed the whole day. I sent them appointment letters. One was for camhs due to having anxiety and ocd and finally getting an app with them and the others some tests at the hospital.

more recently he’s had a cold and had 2 days off. He was told he should have come in with a cold but with ds’s sensory needs he really struggles with the feel of a blocked nose and rubs his face raw where it bleeds. He needs to be kept home for his and the schools sanity until the worse is over. This was just 2 days recently.

so anyway, he’s been told he needs to work harder to come to school and should come to school even when poorly.

I don’t keep him off for no reason. I don’t want him off!

would you send an email to form tutor to say that his attendance is unfortunate but nothing we could have done differently?!

he is so upset as he’s so eager to please at school.

Blame Ofsted, who insist on schools improving attendance.

I'd ask for a meeting about this with the SENCO, form teacher and maybe the head of year. I'd ask them not to speak to your DS directly about attendance, nor read out his attendance during form time or make any direct or indirect reference about attendance to him. I'd be clear with the SENCO that this is part of his anxiety, so it is not productive to pressurise him like this. They should contact you directly about his attendance, if and when they need to.

Schools are under huge pressure from OFSTED, they shouldn't be discussing this with others though- this is unacceptable:

my sons school read out their attendance level in form time and discuss it in front of others

My DS is younger but gets upset when it comes to attendance, he has an ongoing condition which means he has more time off than most, but if he can be in even for part days be always is. Instead of being praised for pushing himself to attend even when he's struggling he feels like he's failing. I said to the school I appreciate all of the targets they have and agree that attendance is important, but he is in when he can be and he doesn't enjoy being off but it's unavoidable; I also forwarded a letter from his consultant and said I'm happy for them to discuss his attendance with us but not to mention it to him or make him feel bad.

Sadly I don't know the solution, lots of positive affirmation at home helps us like brilliant for going in when you've struggled and explaining that still of course super proud when he's off school- it's something that can't be helped.

Surely an individual child’s attendance level is private? There could be many private and personal reasons for non-attendance that aren’t really for public consumption. I’d contact the school and explicitly say you don’t give consent for your child’s attendance to be discussed publicly. It could lead to bullying, discrimination and even poorer attendance. Bloody ridiculous. I wonder if the school staff would be happy for their absence and the reasons for this to be discussed in the staff room so their peers can come up with ways for them to improve.

Blame Ofsted, who insist on schools improving attendance.

Or the SLT who presumably approved this approach to improving attendance.

Why did he need to miss the whole day for the hospital appointments? Can’t you pick him up at break time/after a lesson and drop him off to go back to lessons afterwards?

I know that schools are under huge pressure from Ofsted etc about attendance so don't entirely blame the school. But I absolutely hate the way that my child's senior school (and many others that I know of) calculate and reward good attendance. At the end of each term there is some sort of treat activity for those with 100% attendance, usually involving missing lessons (the irony). This means that any child who has been ill, or any child with medical conditions requiring hospital appointments etc will always be one of the few left behind in the classroom whilst their friends do something fun. There is no discretion applied for those with medical conditions. Equally, a pupil who arrives a few minutes late for school after an early morning medical appointment (taken to minimise the amount of school missed) misses out as much as if they had take a whole day off.

I would love to see data on how effective this sort of reward is for improving attendance. I suspect that those pupils who play truant will not be persuaded to go to school by the offer of a treat, parents who keep their children at school for no reason will not be too concerned about whether they get a reward, and pupils with medical needs/genuine illness clearly can't do anything about that.

I loathe attendance based rewards of any kind. Firstly it's unfair on children who miss school through no fault of their own for hospital appointments or other things. Secondly, it encourages children to come to school unwell, and pass germs round to kids who may not be able to shake it off as easily. Absolutely unfair for everyone.

I feel like if they're going to do attendance awards they should be called sometimes else, like dedication award or something, which just means your attendance was as good as possible, under your own personal circumstances.

appointment was middle of the day, appointment takes an hour. Hospital is an hour away! So wasn’t worth it!

Thanks all. A lot of parents have complained about the reading out of attendance. I think k it happens less often than it used to but they still do it! It should absolutely be private!

That is disgraceful. In your shoes I would be absolutely incandescent with rage about this.

They cannot blame a child or tell them off for absences due to illness or for any kind of mental health reasons, and especially not in front of other children in the class. That is exactly the sort of thing that bullies would gleefully latch onto as well. I'm appalled.

The school should have handled this differently but 70% is very low. The school has to act on this, not for Ofsted but because any child not in school 30% of the time is concerning.
I agree with PP, arrange a meeting with SENDCo and look for ways to better address this.

You can't blame Ofsted for how a school decides to deal with health related absences. I would contact the SENCO and head and complain and ask to discuss how they handle this going forward. Would they read out poor attendance for a child with cancer? If not, it's not up to the class tutor to decide what is "worthy" of being off sick.

I'd be taking him in for at least the morning before a hospital appointment. If he gets a morning mark, that would be less absence. Depending on the exact times, mine would also be going in after the appointment if it meant them making last lesson.

But, 70% attendance, over the 12 weeks of school we've had so far, is 18 days off. That is a lot.

So say the appointment is at 11, can’t he go in for the first lesson and come back afterwards? Or if it’s at 1 leave at lunch and come in for the morning? Unless the appointments take a really long time it’s only going to be about 3 hours out of the day and he could go in before/afterwards…

It would be a very straightforward request to ask that as a reasonable adjustment for your DS's disability, his Attebdance score is not read out in fork time due to the anxiety it causes him. Autistic children are often highly aware of rules and anxious about breaking them.

So that's an easy request.

However, your DS may not want to be viewed by his peers as getting different treatment from his peers, or fears being teased (not suggesting he is, just saying it's a possibility - it is for my autistic DS).

In that case it could be interesting to see if several parents of autistic DC could group together to request a school-wide policy change around this. Not sure if you could class this as a collective request for reasonable adjustments because I think that mechanism may be linked to an individual's needs. But you could certainly write collectively to school explaining your thoughts.

Form time not fork

1. Send your email to the head not the form teacher. Staff are told to do this. I refuse to as I drive it intensely. I so am asked to contact parents when attendance falls below a certain percentage. I hate doing this.
2. There are many kids for whom poor attendance is a result of illness and is very legitimate.
3. There are also many parents who do not take attendance seriously. I have had kids off because it is their or their siblings birthday. This is not unusual. Or because they are going on a trip out with their grannies or because they are tired after going to a show etc etc.
4. There are also kids whose parents let them stay off if they have a test or hwk due or if they have a detention that they are trying to avoid.

In short there are many parents doing their best with sick kids but there are also many who do not take attendance seriously. Many of these kids are behind academically or socially.

• dislike it intensely

I’d be asking for the equalities impact assessment of this particular school policy. My Dads attendance is around 70% due to attendance at therapy appointments, much needed surgery and appointments required to assess for and support surgery. I’d be furious if her attendance was read out to her class, leaving her to explain her private medical concerns to justify her absence. And I doubt a class of 12 year olds are going to come up with anything to improve her attendance given it’s complete out of her control.

While Ofsted may demand improvements in school attendance I very much doubt they told the school to go about it like this.

This was unreasonable. He should have gone in before and after. You're making poor excuses saying he had to miss two full days of school, 12 hours, for three hour appointments. it would have been worth going in as you would have got some of the days marks.

did he ask to stay off with a cold or did you decide it was best to keep him off?

how much of his sickness absences is you deciding it would be better to keep him off rather than him being too sick?

OK, aged governor here. The issue is statistics and Ofsted. Ofsted are currently putting a lot of pressure on schools around attendance, the expectation is 95% across the school. However, you are only in term 1, so the weighting on days off at the end of term 1 is high but by term three each day will only be worth a third of the amount of the days in term 1. So, if he has two weeks out each term, your attendance will be up at 85%.

Your child has additional needs, and this should be factored into his attendance, so removing the hospital visits of three days a term, you would be up to 90% over an academic year. And yes, I have had to argue stats with Inspectors before now...

appointment was middle of the day, appointment takes an hour. Hospital is an hour away! So wasn’t worth it!

So you’d put him in at 9, to pick him up at 11 for an appointment and hour away that lasts for an hour, so returning him to school at 2 to finish at 3.30? I probably would have put him in in the morning but not for the afternoon because he still wouldn’t have had lunch. In saying that some of my DDs appointments are very anxiety provoking so I wouldn’t necessarily put her in for the morning, because she wouldn’t cope with school with heightened anxiety levels.

Also I do agree that you should be sending him in and picking up for appointments not taking whole day off.

I absolutely hate this. As a teenager I suffered from ME and I felt like shit anyway, felt totally freakish for having it, so to have been targeted for being off ill on top of it all would’ve been even worse.

Teachers generally know who’s taking the piss and who is generally sick.

My son got a letter for having four days off over the first two terms, he had a virus and really hurt his back for the other attendance. They chose to send the letter in early Jan which is when attendance averages won’t be good as it’s the time of year for viruses, by July he was totally at the right percentage. So I did write back a snotty letter saying that my medical consultant husband was probably better than them at assessing who is fit for school, didn’t hear back funnily enough.