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!

Re INSET days - no impact as students are expected to do 190 days a year, staff 195 - the 5 different are the INSET days.

Snow days we set snow day work, and try to minimise them as much as possible, but staff travel from up to 2 hour commutes away to my school so it is a numbers of staff vs pupils balancing act.

I actually don't mind attendance awards. Given the culture of ringing in work for a sniffle or duvet day, I'd rather mine valued high attendance.

Schools need to show they are monitoring attendance due to ofsted. Parents may moan but many will have used the ofsted report when picking a school in the first place.

Yes many will have looked at an ofsted report before choosing a school, but I can't say that seeing 'attendance is an issue in this school' would put me off a particular school.

As for the posters saying low attendance means there is something going on at home, that's not always the case. Correlation does not imply causation. The same with sweeping statements like 'children who are frequently absent dont do well at school'. Again, not always the case.

Kids' school's just managed to get outstanding in Ofsted without resorting to the adversarial attendance harassment nonsense.

I didn't actually look at the Ofsted report at all before the kids went there incidentally.

Back in October my son was ill for a whole week and we were questioned at length by the school about his attendance despite me sending in proof of attendance at the doctor's and photos of prescription medication. The school was complaining that his attendance had gone below 80%.
I said yes of course it will look like that if you do your maths wrong and express 5 days abcence as a percentage of the 35 days of the year already elapsed and not 5 days as a percentage of the 190 days of the whole year.
My son has had no further sickness and as a result his percentage attendance has started to climb.
I also made it abundantly clear that I was only keeping him home on the advice of the medical profession and if school staff were medically qualified they could overturn that decision, but until they got themselves a medical degree he was staying home.
I also told them that I had no wish to be home as I wasn't going to get paid, but in this case because my son is a priority then I was obliged to .

The focus on attendance instead of performance is ludicrous

You can't possibly imagine that there is a link between attendance and performance?

Or are you suggesting that only the top performing children should be allowed to take term-time holidays whilst the rest catch up with them?

Do you ever consider that high performing children might perform even better if their attendance was as high as it could be?

My child performs well across all subjects, and exceptionally well in Literacy and maths. Her attendance is 90.3%
She has the highest SATs results in the year group, but the lowest attendance. I'll say it again, correlation does not imply causation. Just because children who have low attendance generally perform poorly, it does not mean that is the sole reason. Children who have low attendance also tend to have SEN, safeguarding issues, poor parental engagement and come from low income families. That is more the cause of the issue than their attendance. We have none of the above issues, but low attendance and my children are doing very well thank you very much.
Statistics can be manipulated to say whatever the hell you're trying to prove.

Attendance below 90% is appalling and the poster above should be ashamed that her child's education is so unimportant to her.

I'll just pop down to school and tell my daughter that it was an appalling show of negligence for her to get pneumonia and spend a week in hospital, nearly ending up in HDU shall I? Or the surgery I know she's going to have to go through next year - I'll tell her that she simply needs to educate her body better in order to meet attendance targets. Or all the different therapy sessions she's got to have next year where we'll get no say in the appointment times or days at all over (bye bye my career huh). Like fuck I will - she's a kid who's meeting age related expectations - despite having a really crap run of health problems and SEN - so she's doing bloody awesomely to be there despite all of that.

Abso-fucking- lutely to this. My DD is in the same situation, sometimes just getting to school in the morning is a massive achievement. for Oiwhotookthegoodnames Keep hanging on in there, hope your DDs situation will improve!

Those talking about children needing to learn commitment forget that the child never made a commitment to going to school in the first place. They have to be in school by law unless their parents are in a position to home educate, which most parents are not. A 7yo doesn't make a commitment: she gets taken to a school chosen by her parents- quite often out of a choice of one.

A sickly or disabled adult can choose not to take a job that they know they would never be able to handle. If they fall ill once they are in a job, the law protects them in various ways. If they have to leave a job, they may be faced with poverty but they will not be investigated by Social Services under the threat of fines or prison for their nearest and dearest.

This is why life is so much easier for my disabled dd now she is an adult. There are no doubts hundreds of jobs she couldn't do with her condition, but then nobody forces her to apply for those jobs.

Before she went into HE she questioned the school very closely to see how well they supported disability. Universities and other similar institutions have specialist staff whose job it is to make sure that students with Special Considerations get adequate support, those staff get trained and there is a set of procedures that have to be followed. Once she had that information she was able to make a commitment to the course, in the knowledge that if it becomes too much, she can leave.

As an adult I know I couldn't become a lorry driver because my eyesight isn't good enough: in fact, I can't drive at all. Attempting to do so would make me ill with stress/eyestrain and most likely cause a serious accident. But there are hundreds of jobs which you can do without 3 D vision so I just went for one of them instead.

A chronically ill or disabled child are in a position where there is only one job: they are thrown into that driver's seat and told they have to drive. And they know that their families will be penalised if they refuse to start up the engine.

excellent post corythatwas

Our school sent attendance officers when my ASD son was so anxious that he was trying to kill himself (at age 11).

Absolutely no way was I going to let them try to scare him into going into school.

Formal education does not suit everyone. There are many reasons for absence. There are other ways to be educated without attending school (if your parents are able to do it in an alternative way which many are not).

Google the statistics on SEN parents being forced to withdraw their children from a formal education due to the drop in funding to meet children's needs in school. It's a disgrace. Especially when the same parents were probably faced with fines for not being able to get their children into schools where their needs are not being met.

There is much more to this issue than meets the eye.

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!

Alternatively they could just fuck off with this nonsense. A receipt for paracetamol indeed! You have a sick child, you are not claiming back expenses!

I believe it was Mark Twain who said 'I've never let school get in the way of my education'
That's exactly the approach we take. Education is important, vital even. School, however, is not. Which is why home education is allowed in this country. The schooling system does not work for everybody, just as the 9-5 working world doesn't suit everybody either.

low attendce is link to low achievement if your not their you can’t learn

If you're dead you don't learn very well either.

My 11yo son found his sister after her first suicide attempt. He did all the right things: kept her warm, phoned for an ambulance, stayed with her. But I was told afterwards he cried the whole time.

She had jumped from a window because she was so afraid of collapsing at school and not being believed; she just wanted it all to stop.

She had never had a non-medical absence from school in her entire life.

Of course her learning was affected by her low attendance. And by her being in almost constant pain. And by her being so afraid of letting the side down that she wanted to die.

But tell you what- punishing her did absolutely fuck all to cure her genetic disorder. It did fuck all to stop the pain. It did fuck all to make the hospitals schedule her appointments and ops for some magical clinic that only happens when school is out.

In the meantime, were there any sanctions for the teachers who just left her sit on her own in a classroom without tuition for a whole term's worth of maths lessons because it was too much bother to get her set timetabled for downstairs and then wrote in her school report that her results would no doubt have been better if she had been able to take part in lessons?

Were there any sanctions for the HT who refused to let her use the disabled toilet because he wanted to keep it for visitors?

Were there any sanctions for the receptionist who registered her as absent for no medical reason when they knew she was in hospital?

Were there any sanctions for the teachers and TAs who stood by and did nothing when a physically disabled child crawled on her hands and knees to get into the toilet?

if you are not there you can't learn

absolute rubbish. If you are not happy (in a good mental place) you cannot learn.

My son was not achieving because of the environment in school. Projected levels around a 4 (old c grade) if he worked hard across the board.

Away from the environment for nearly 2 years he is now 12 and at level 3a for English only 4 marks from the level that school thought he will be at at 16.

I have no idea why people think that you can only learn in schools and that schools are automatically the best.

Some children will not learn outside of school because of other factors (probably lack of parental interest) but it is entirely incorrect to say that a child must be in school to learn.

that being said my own mother still believes that school is the best place for my son even given the evidence we have to the contrary.

That is how ingrained/ indoctrinated we are to believe that an education can only occur in a school environment.

cory that's absolutely dreadful, your poor daughter and son (the knock on effect on siblings should not be forgotten).

One head teacher fetched an ill child from home in her car so that the class could get 100% attendance. Tick box mentality gone mad.

Cory - awful experience

It took years for my black and white thinking ASD son to separate school and education. His experiences had led to severe School phobia and he really thought his life was over when it all became too much and his Ss placement, together with the possibility of any successful placement, finally fell apart age 14.

I honestly expected he would follow through with suicide threats every day - especially when this was backed up by the LA refusing to deliver tuition and therapy unless he was in a brick placement. Every day I thought 'this will be the day he dies' - for years. The strain is almost unbearable. I survived because local Carer's support would phone me and listen to me sob down the line. But still the LA EOTAS tutor had the front to tell me off and point out that Carer's support wasn't for the likes of me but was for 'real' carers.

He didn't really accept it and begin to engage with tutors until his younger brother started internet school and he could see that education and school really are separate things.

If you care about 100% attendance you are lucky and can afford compassion.

How about preparation for the world of work where low attendance has a massive impact on the rest of the team?

Isn't part of going to school not just for learning but to teach them that being punctual and attending is important. If they learn that young and throughout school life then it's setting them up to have a good work ethic.

If they are ill they are ill or if they have SEN needs then that's a different matter. But the amount of parents who will keep their kids off for anything; a sniffle, they are tired, they feel like they need a duvet day, the child's birthday What on earth of this teaching your kids who will one day be employed!

The amount of employees who call in sick, thus leaving the team in the shit, for pretty much the same reasons as the ones I just gave for the kids!

SEN aside, teach your kids that unless you are really unwell; show up on time and attend school everyday. It will set them up with a brilliant mindset as they go on to employment!

Thirty that is exactly what I was saying

School isn't just about learning your academics, it's teaching and preparing your kids for real life! Calling in sick for work often as no big deal is not a mindset you want to be teaching your kids!

Darkestnight our school snow days were marked down on the dc's attendance. 10 days in total...

Trouble is that the 'rules' for attendance for non-Sen (NT) child is the same for the SEN child or a child with physical disability. There are not different expectations. Thanks to a misunderstanding of 'inclusion'.

I (like other SEN parents) am an Uber parent. I have read all the books, been on all the courses etc. I have moved house, given up my career (post-graduate). I didn't cause my DS's autism because I lack a work ethic or don't care enough. This is insulting.

Thirtyrock39 Fri 13-Jul-18 15:49:52

How about preparation for the world of work where low attendance has a massive impact on the rest of the team?

That's what the school kept telling dd.

What they didn't tell her was:

• that you don't have to take a job you can't cope with in the first place.

• that you can choose to train for a career that your body/mind can handle.

• that you can choose to work part-time for less money.

• that there are jobs that are flexi-time and jobs that can be done from home.

• that if you get really, really ill and unable to work, there are benefits.

• that whatever happens and however bad you are at your job your family can't be punished for it.

They didn't tell dd any of that. That's why she wanted to die: because she already wasn't coping, she knew her condition was incurable, and the adults around her kept telling her it was going to get worse. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for a chronically ill child who hears the words "well, don't expect people to put up with this sort of thing when you get older".

KeepOn, I know exactly what it is like to think 'this will be the day he dies' and to have to go on thinking it the next day and the day after that.

Dd is now in that adult world. She held down a job for 2 years and is now in HE. She has been through some bad times and is still on medication, but there is nothing in either the workplace or HE that is on any level comparable with being a small frightened child in pain surrounded by adults who believe you are lying. Nothing.