To not understand the fuss over attendance?

[CestLeWhy]

disclaimer: I didn't go through the state schooling system in the UK, DS is in reception, so I have no experience of school quotas/ funding/ social services. I'm not trying to be goady, I'm genuinely asking.

What is the fuss about attendance? I see so many posters proudly stating their kids have 100% attendance, and that is to be celebrated as it shows they are very conscientious, but why is it such a big deal?

DS just received his reception report and got 'Exceeding' in every category and glowing praise (not even a stealth boast, I am so proud) but his attendance was below 90%. So what? He's only 5. If he's poorly, which he is often, I keep him home rather than send him in for a miserable day for him and disruption to the class. A large chunk is also accounted for as we are from a different country so I take 2-3 days off a year for him to celebrate our cultural holidays. I think it's more important for him to grow up assimilating both cultures than attend every single day. I don't want to drip feed, we had a family emergency which caused some of the days off, but even without, his attendance would have been below 95%.

I can understand lots of reasons to monitor attendance: it can be a safeguarding indicator, it's important in higher years where they learn at a very fast pace etc but I just can't understand why it's considered so important in isolation for all year groups.

Educate me, please, MN!

Well my DS was off yesterday and today due to his disability, rang school both days explained etc....got phone call from head teacher, stating his attendance is 89%.
As it is below 90% EWO will be monitoring it and that when he is ill I will have to provide (get ready for it!)
*doctors note
*appointment
I said "what about when he has D&V?"

• provide a receipt for dyralite
  I said " ok and say he has a virus?" *provide a receipt for paracetamol!

Serious WTAF?!

I actually did not realise that when you send your DC to school , all of your parental rights are taking from you!

Like in other posts OUR CHILDREN ARE HUMAN NOT NUMBERS OR STATISTICS!!!

@carebea
That is ridiculous, I never buy dyorilyte purely because it’s never necessary and also paracetamol can last a long time so that not gonna prove anything.
Schools these days I think go too overboard in terms of keeping up numbers.
My dd teacher is leaving the school at the end of the year but dd won’t be able say goodbye because we are leaving on holiday that day and I can’t say nothing to the teacher for fear of getting fined. She’s been with dd for 3 years. I don’t feel I should pay to take them out one day early when all they will be doing is watching films and having fun.

Not got time to read the whole thread, but YANBU. I hate it!
It is not about the child, there are better ways to target children whose parents are not getting their kids to school when they are well and able to go. It is all about the school hitting a performance target. Schools put pressure on to achieve 100% attendance regardless of whether this is good for an individual child. For example, not giving appropriate phased introduction to a young child moving to a new school because they don't want to affect performance targets'/ punishing children for not having sufficient attendance even if they have been off with serious illness (you went to hospital! No you can't attend the prom!)

I really, really hate it. I hate the way it reflects how the schools have been turned into target hitting business centres and not child centred communities.

not read the thread so may be repeating...there is evidence that show children with below 95% attendance do worse in their GCSEs. And whilst we can all provide of exceptional children who exceed targets and are all set to be the youngest prime minister by the age of 21, it’s really not rocket science to understand that the more time you have off school, the harder it’s going to be for you come assessment and exam time. Missed days in primary can mean you miss essential teaching in, say, maths which you never catch up on and which leaves a hole in learning which is never quite filled.

Children with 90% or lower are missing huge amounts of learning.

Looking at the table one PP posted, 90% attendance equates roughly to 4 missed weeks a year, which over the whole 7 primary school years, could be up to 7 months . Does potentially missing 7 months of primary school not matter to some people?! (Chronic medical conditions aside)

DS1 (ASD) 'failed' transition to secondary. Education Welfare were nowhere to be found. But I thought every school day counts, and every child matters? I reassured myself that EOTAS was the statutory duty of the LA after 15 days medical absence and that they also had a duty to find alternative suitable placement especially for a child with a diagnosed disability and an EHCP. Not so it seems - unless you go to court.

We had to fight for EOTAS but also were forced to go (at great cost, financial and emotional) to Tribunal. It took 4 months for EOTAS to be provided (maximum 5 hours per week) plus another 4 months to Tribunal hearing.

Special school only lasted 4 terms. It then took the LA nine months to provide EOTAS and we were forced to start Judicial Review proceedings to get a personal budget for the tuition and therapy specified in his EHCP. This took us from year 9 to Year 11. He missed 11 whole terms of secondary education and yet the LA were not fined or held accountable.

There should be equality. If parents are fined for each day of school missed, LAs should also be fined for each day they fail to provide placement. Instead they wanted to wash their hands of any responsibility when he was just 14 and argued there was no point. Parents would be fined if not jailed for the equivalent.

Not only is there disability discrimination by stealth expecting 100% attendance but this policy also underpins outright discrimination in the form of illegal exclusions, part-time reduced timetables and 'off rolling' of SEN children so that they don't 'skew' statistics. Stinks.

The focus on attendance instead of performance is ludicrous.

I think the focus on the level (exceeding expectations, expected and emerging) at age 5 is also ludicrous.

It's to flag up problems and help focus for the next teacher and put in place intervention groups etc. Not so the parents can brag about it.

@KeepOnKeepingOn1

we are in exactly your position now. My son can't be in mainstream secondary because of his needs.

There are no special schools that can meet his academic potential.

There is therefore no placement that we can put on the EHCP.

We have submitted papers to the LA and have asked for EOTAS and a personal budget and a meeting is supposed to take place tomorrow. Guess what? The LA have contacted me today to say they are not attending the meeting.

Bloody ridiculous. My son wants to be educated.

You are spot on in your post. I know we will have a fight and it is so dreadfully unfair.

In primary, a quick chat with the teacher or email can solve the worry about what your child has missed at school. Then you can cover it at home.

When we go on holiday, we go to museums, we see new things, we broaden our horizons. It's learning about the world by actually being there. School pales in comparison.

I think learning work/life balance is more important than learning that work is the most important thing. There has to be balance! Not feeling free to take your children to funerals and weddings or once in a lifetime opportunities (the things that make life and hard work worth while) is extremely sad.

If it wasn't for illness my kids would have 100% attendance as we don't do term time holidays. Rewarding attendance is an awful idea as kids can't help being sick, maybe if the 100% kids were actually kept home when they had bugs It wouldn't have such a knock on effect with the other kids.

Not every child that has 100% attendance is keeping up tho
My son is behind even tho he’s been there everyday Luckily we’ve dodged illness this year ( so far - fingers crossed)
Due to his adhd

Also another of my friends gets ‘given’ holiday from work. It can be any two weeks between may and September. Guess how many people want to swap their holiday for time off in school holidays - everyone
Obviously not everyone gets what they want so either this family has no holiday at all or goes in term time
It’s not as black and white as some would have us believe

my son is currently with his English tutor studying Romeo and Juliet for his GSCE. He wants to study and is 'high functioning' but has experienced severe anxiety.

LA fought us until SOS!SEN stepped in and he now has PB for tutors for 5 GCSEs even though he is now 17 and the LA argued it was too late and pointless and he should just do functional skills or attend a 6 week social enterprise scheme for disadvantaged youth.

My son ACTUALLY missed almost 130 months of secondary education and the people that it didn't matter to were educational experts employed by the LA and funded by parents as tax-payers.

We keep fighting because the alternative is unbearable. He is lucky to have you as an advocate.

Yes it is exactly the same. Anxiety driven by ASD and sensory difficulties.

I wonder whether it amounts to educational negligence for an LEA to wilfully obstruct a child from obtaining an appropriate education?

Our LEA are messing with the wrong person if they muck my son around to much.

I am glad you have got to the point that your son can do GCSE's . No one truly understands the situation that we are in unless they are in it.

Taratill - have you considered internet school? DS2 (also ASD but academically gifted) has PB to fund internet school where he is studying 11 subjects. He sat 2 Cambridge maths stage 9 papers yesterday and got 93%. He is 12.

Attendance at live lessons is recorded but all lessons are archived and DC can catch up if they miss a lesson, watch the recording if needed and can log on from anywhere so can go on holiday in term time and still be 'present'.

as somone who fostered their is often a direct correlation between low attendance and things very wrong at home of fact it’s one of the indicators

Almost every child I cared for had very low school attendance
And low attendce is link to low achievement if your not their you can’t learn and for many children school is the most stable place for them it often provides them with all the things their not getting at home

I also did a stint at a young carers trust and the attendance for those children was shocking also

Traveller children awful attendance very high levels of illiteracy

Yes I've considered but it won't work because he's dyslexic and has processing issues and they don't differentiate he would therefore end up in lower ability groups than he's capable of. That and the fact that he struggles with noise would make it very challenging and ED Psych has specifically ruled it out as an option. We're looking at a combo of Wolsey hall and tutors for Maths and English plus the therapy he needs to reintergrate eventually.

Well done to your son that's amazing.

It’s not just the learning outcomes though, in a number of instances of child abuse case, there has been poor attendance (to try and minimise being found out). Attendance is flagged within safeguarding training for this reason. By itself it is not a safeguarding issues as such, but it may be as part of a bigger picture with a particular family.

Ours have had no lessons this week and will have no lessons next week. That's a "vital" 5% of the school year right there.

If there was any question whether there's a dip in ability in September because of the long holiday I think it can be answered by the fact that they stopped teaching weeks before the end of term.

I have been reading this thread with interest. I work in a school and without doubt the children with poor attendance are the ones working below expectations. It is also true to say that in most cases these children come from deprived backgrounds where education is not valued. There are a few parents who take children out for holidays but in most cases the children can make up the lost ground when they come back so it doesn’t make much difference.
To the poster who said that someone she knows child had 100% attendance for 7 years of primary school. My own DD is one of these. She has had 100% attendance every year since year 1. She is now coming to the end of year 9. She is lucky she rarely gets ill. The odd cold but nothing that bad to keep her away from school. She has had D&V once which happened to be during the school holidays and Chicken Pox over a Christmas holiday. My DS on the other hand picked up every bug going when he was younger and hasn’t managed a year without a few days off, so I am not some evil mother who sends the kids into school just to get 100% attendance. There are genuinely kids out there with strong constitutions who just don’t get ill.

Just wondering do inset days and snow dats go against school attendance even tho the school issues them ?

Days*

Inset days come out of holidays - they’re not added on, staff used to get the same amount of time off as pupils, now they have less.

I'm not in the UK, and our schools don't pay much attention to attendance figures as a percentage.

On the other hand, if a child isn't doing well at school, they get in touch to discuss why, and talk about strategies they could put in place to remedy that.

It works extremely well as a system.

In our first year here after we'd moved from the UK I very cautiously asked DD's teacher how she felt about DD maybe taking a couple of term-time days off to go on holiday. She was very encouraging, saying that travel is good for kids, and that if she felt DD was falling behind at all she'd let me know, but that as things were at that point it would be absolutely fine.

At my school we have been told to teach to the last, we break up next week - my lessons this week have been teaching as normal. Admittedly I have finished the planned teaching for the year but I am recapping topics I know they have struggled with. Some are in a bit of a fun way, designing an online quiz with at least 50% of my subject content included.

As for getting time off approved for various things mentioned above, same rules apply for staff as well as students. My grandmother has just passed away, I have had 2 days off in the space of the last 3.5 weeks due to this, one to register the death, one to attend the funeral. Given I am the next of kin and have had to organise everything from over 100 miles away, I could quite easily moan I should have had more time off but it's just not an option for us.