To want schools to drop attendance incentives?

[Sophie632]

So my son has a medical condition and has to attend hospitals appointments - sometimes not locally. Our school give out certificates for 100% attendance and he rarely gets these. There is now talk of starting a scheme where the whole class is rewarded each day everyone is in. I don’t think this is fair to children who have disabilities or medical conditions that may make them need to miss school, totally outside of their control. Also - should we really reward children purely because they don’t catch any nasty bugs? Hardly seems fair!

You could suggest to the school that children like yours should be awarded a credit for hospital appts.

Remind them it's illegal to discriminate due to disability

As someone who has a couple of chronic health conditions which were diagnosed as a child, I inevitably had more days off school than my friends as I had regular hospital appointments etc. I never got one of those "Gold Standard" awards they gave out at the end of every term for full attendance and that was disheartening enough as a little kid, but there were lots of us who didn't get the gold standard award so it wasn't so rough.

Singling a child out as the reason the class doesn't get awarded is a really good way to alienate a child, leading to bullying. Especially if it's the same child multiple times, due to health conditions or other illnesses which are completely unavoidable.

Although I understand why schools emphasise the need for high attendance, sometimes being absent cannot be avoided and usually, if the child has health conditions and is in and out of hospital (as I was) they already find they stand out amongst their peers somewhat. To now make the whole class miss out on something because one child was absent is abhorrent and will not improve the attendance in the way they're hoping.

We need to change what it is that they're measuring. The school is judged for attendance and it isn't fair on the school or children involved to be penalised where the child has a known health condition. Not entirely sure how it would be structured but when these children are absent due to an appointment etc it shouldn't count as absent.

In general though i also think these are stupid and just encourage children in when ill and then infect others.

Exactly @Pilgit - DSCs mum always sends them in even when they are clearly contagious just because she sees it as a badge of honour for them to get 100% attendance every term. Interestingly my children (who miss a lot due to chronic illness) are both far more likely to read and learn in their own time and get much better marks for behaviour and attitude (as well as level pegging academically)

I’m utterly horrified by this. So, bad enough if you’ve been poorly, or have a disability - but you’ve to watch all your mates have fun without you. For kids (or anyone) with disabilities, there’s enough other times in life you have to look on whilst your friends have fun you’re unable to, without it being a ‘reward’.

Absolutely agree. My middle dd is autistic and struggles with attendance. Youngest dd has been hit with every virus going. Our school has a system whereby the classes are rewarded for the highest attendance every week. My dd said her classmates get annoyed with the children who are off because they do t get their reward.

It's an awful system!

Clearly as your child is seriously ill needing hospital appointments you could ask that they are not included in the whole class attendance challenge. However good health is not as random as some people think (eat healthily and exercise and most illnesses will not affect you). Many children and parents take time off far too easily imagining they are much more ill and unfortunate than everyone else.

They need to focus on the kids whose parents can't be bothered to send their kids to school Wed-Fri

Last term my daughter was quite upset about it because she had been really ill, but did laugh when one name was called out in assembly for his award and his TA shouted back that he wasn't there, he was on holiday 😬

Unfortunately many have gone too far now and children are kept off for random days when they don’t feel quite right. I’ve never known such awful attendance with many now missing a day a fortnight.
I hate 100% attendance awards etc for the reasons others have given but there is a problem that needs to be tackled. No child can help being but a lot of the absences aren’t due to illness, but tired or not wanting to come in. Even from parents I consider sensible. I think working from home has made it em easier to keep them home and it’s felt acceptable to not go in now for the odd day. The odd days add up.
Schools are getting constant pressure from those above.
We can’t win - we get grief from all sides and it’s draining.

Since we joined a MAT the pressure on children to be in school - even when they are clearly ill - has risen massively and I hate it! As a teacher, I hate having to hand out the letters to parents who I KNOW are already doing their best and can do nothing about their child getting ill or the child is off due to the fact the parent is struggling. All it does is add unnecessary pressure on a family. OFSTED need to be removed and academies need to realise we are dealing with children, not robots, as they are behind so much extra stress on teachers and families that is not needed!

Agree such incentives should be scrapped. Disabilities the main reason, but also the absences that in my mind are worse are those where someone has more time away than really needed, or where they are self-inflicted.

Yes, as a teacher, I can't stand them and nor can any of the people I work with. I frequently tell parents dragging their ill 5 year olds in to school because they 'got a letter' to ignore it because all it does is cause more germs to be spread.

I genuinely thought covid would mark the end of this culture (in work and school) of dragging yourself in unless you were at death's door - because it's common sense to rest so you can recuperate quicker and prevent the spread of illness - but sadly I was wrong.

I once worked with a woman who came into work with chicken pox ffs. Acting like she deserved a medal for coming in when she was so unwell and couldn't understood why it was just selfish and stupid. I was more tactful when speaking to her but that was what I thought.

And for those saying what do we show bloody ofsted if we scrap attendance awards.

Well I don't believe ofsted are fit for purpose anyway but I would suggest showing them that you are working with those with medical needs to make sure they don't miss out on the curriculum and working with the families of those who are absent for other reasons to try to improve their situation should be sufficient.

its a rubbish system, but the school cant do anything about it. Blame ofsted and contact your MP.

I had an outbreak of TB in my class once purely because of stupid attendance incentives, and the first case being a deeply conscientious student who would always try and do the right thing. In this case what they perceived as being "the right thing" left several others dangerously ill, one permanently disabled, and one probably infertile

It's not the school. It is those hounding and judging the poor leadership team at schools over the attendance levels. Makes it so hard for some children.

It's not government policy to initiate whole class rewards that make an individual child a target for the rest of his classmates when his hospital appointment ruins the chance of his class getting the reward.

I'm a teacher, and had my school implemented such a reward system, I'd have fought it tooth and nail.

Yes, OFSTED is to blame for the pressure they put on schools re attendance, but for the school to then put that pressure onto a child who has no control over his hospital appointments is really shitty.

Yanbu

I would question the intelligence of any teacher who thought they were a good idea.

I'm sure they would never survive a legal challenge if any parent took it that far. It breaches equalities legislation and is highly discriminatory.

Can you imagine an award only white children could win?

Tbh turning it into a class based thing shows a staggeringly poor level of thought in thr SLT.

Schools are under massive pressure to incentivise attendance by Ofsted, but decent management teams wouldn’t add to the troubles of disabled and ill children by making them the target for their classmates as well as missing out on individual awards.

Pretty much any award discriminates against someone though. They are all celebrations of some attribute or opportunity that some people have and others don't. I wouldn't object to them on those grounds.

Whole class attendance awards absolutely shouldn't be a thing - utterly useless, pointless thing in which to bring peer pressure into play. But beyond that I'd leave it and explain to your child that this is one award he won't get and that's ok (my youngest has crohns disease and his attendance for the year is around 70% - attendance awards are just one tiny speck in the unfairness of it all).

They need to make reasonable adjustments for children with disabilities - say, adjust the target to 90% attendance.

When they did that at my friend's kids school, several parents who knew their kids wouldn't be included kept them off anyway. Which rather defeated the point.

Pretty much any award discriminates against someone though. They are all celebrations of some attribute or opportunity that some people have and others don't. I wouldn't object to them on those grounds.

But what's the point of them at primary? They are almost always nothing to do with a child. I take your point on reward and as I've said upthread I'm in favour of quite a broad-based reward system, but focused on things that are about the children themselves - their achievements, their efforts and their behaviours - rather than mostly about their parents or their circumstances.

Decent school management make awards about effort.

A maths award doesn’t necessarily have to be top of the class award. My DS2 got a maths award once purely based on the effort he’d put into a subject he really struggled with.

The HT at DD3’s school has this subject nailed. The kids all get awards at various points, but they are all meaningful because they aren’t just random “best maths” “best spelling” ones. They actually recognise the achievement of the specific child and have an understanding that what is an achievement for one kid isn’t in another.

But you can't. It's no more reasonable to expect my ds to discharge himself from hospital early or to skip a treatment or two to meet a 90% target than it is a 100% one. It just isn't fair, life isn't fair. Whether it's important enough to worry about in the grand scheme of unfairness I'm not so sure.

As things stand ds2 won't get to go to prom next year, unless they get the disease totally under control. That seems really unfair, I might go into battle for that one.