How the fuck do you improve attendance

[Merryoldgoat]

I’ve had the delightful LA attendance officer letting me know my son’s attendance is 85%.

I KNOW. I’m the one looking after him.

How am I supposed to stop him getting ill? I’d love to know.

I’m just sick of it. We’re juggling two autistic children, a full time job and I get this officious letter implying I’m keeping him off under false pretences.

It’s such a stupid blunt instrument.

I’m angry and tired and just sick of it.

I have no AIBU. It’s just the rant of an exhausted parent. DH is also exhausted in case anyone is wondering.

@MrsBennetsPoorNerves it can be very difficult with autistic kids to know if there is an underlying condition. In fact it’s hard to get taken seriously at all sometimes. My son is constantly thin/pale/has rashes/spots/stomach ache/bone pain etc. We have been told ‘autistic people have odd stomachaches’, ‘the rash is just a white person thing’, ‘it’s possibly an allergy but don’t change his diet because it will cause stress’, ‘we can put him on more medication but we don’t really know what is wrong with him’. Add in autistic burnout which is very variable and you end up with a child who never feels well and no solution.

@Mydpisgrumpierthanyours I imagine in reference to this suggestion www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64803947

That was a reference to Michael Gove’s ridiculous suggestion yesterday- I don’t think the poster was endorsing it.

Not sure about your kids school OP, but ours now have to have medical evidence now before the absence is authorised. Not sure how thats gonna work🤷‍♀️.

It's literally the luck of the draw and ironically the reason we are having so much sickness in schools is because of the targets
Think about it
Child a is sick mum sends child into school regardless because they are "usually ok" after being sick once
Child b has a weaker immune system and catches the sickness from child a this makes them very ill they have time off school parents stick to the 48 hour rule and get hit with "attendance warning" letters snd punished

Where is the punishment for the family of child a?

Ours have asked for evidence and I just can’t do that for emergency medical appointments! We don’t get written letters

In our school they don't mark down the attendance if they turned up and get sent home.
So there was a big push on sending your sick kid in to 'see how it goes' i.e. get their attendance point and then leave.
I'm sure it helped get some kids in who were well enough but it also increased the amount of kids who were vomiting all over the desks

The irony is they are probably picking up the illness at school after other children have been sent in mildly ill! We had one year where DD picked up everything going (scarlet fever, impetigo, noro, bad cold (as in fever and not moving off sofa, not a runny nose!), and a mystery virus. Mostly linked to school outbreaks.

Yes, I understand that and like I've said, I'm not trying to suggest that the OP's dc isn't genuinely sick or that she isn't doing enough to address this. I'm merely making the point that it's a lot of absence and that I think it's right that schools should investigate this. If the OP is already doing everything possible to support her child's health and school attendance, then she has nothing to worry about.

If schools just ignored poor attendance, some kids would be left to fall through the cracks. I get that the process is frustrating for the OP, but I think it's worth the hassle for the sake of those kids with feckless neglectful parents who don't actually give a shit.

DS2s is 63%, he's Yr11. His has always been low as he has Chronic Fatigue syndrome diagnosed Yr7. This year he developed terrible anxiety (he's also ASD).

Put every absence in writing, even if on your school's message system, refer to the DfE guidelines if you believe the school's policy is perhaps not reasonable (e.g. medical evidence for every absence). Not Fine in School is a good FB group).

I empathise. We have this with our eldest. He has ongoing issues with headaches which are almost better now (was a vit D deficiency but has taken a long time to get his levels back up) and he had covid a few weeks into the Autumn term. He also has medical appointments which you have to take when you get them. (he has orthodontic issues) I had a meeting with the school last week. There isn't much I can do - if he is ill he is ill. Its not like he's wandering around town.

DD has been off a few times since September. There was only one day when she felt too unwell to go to school. All the other sick days were due to the 48-hour-rule regarding an incidence vomiting or diarrhoea.

I understand the rule, but schools need to be realistic about the affect it will have on pupil absence rates. They can’t insist that children stay away and then criticise the parents for their child’s non-attendance!

The whole attendance thing is a farce. My son’s school sent him home because he vomited and they made me keep him at home for 48 hours. Then they said he couldn’t enter the prize draw for children who have 100% attendance at the end of term - because THEY sent him home.

I would absolutely send my child in with d&v, every single time till they get the message, when they are having multiple kids of ill and sick all over the classroom, they will think twice.
The school once asked me for proof, told them have you tried seeing a doc and if you do get in they tell you off for bringing the child in. So I said OK in future I will happily scoop up some sick or poop and pop it in a bag and deliver it right to the reception desk. They didn't really bother me again.
Lockdown and/or covid jabs seem to have caused immune issues with a lot of children being ill more.

85% attendance is approx 1 day off for every 6 days in school. That's a lot!

They are right to highlight it, I cannot believe that a child has been so ill, so many times, since the start of the school year without some underlying chronic condition.

You either need to get them assessed formally, or revise your definition of an illness so serious that they shouldn't attend school.

I worked as a school welfare officer (first aid etc).

That school had the same policy. Parents had to bring their children in.

All that happed was, 8:30am I would have children come into my office, obviously too sick to be in school, with very angry parents.

I was still under orders to tell them to make them line up for class.

If children came to my office sick I was told to string it out and not call parents until after PM registration.

The arguments I had with the attendance officer and the head over it. It was one of the reasons I left after a parent assaulted me for something I thought was bollocks too, their child should have been at home and in bed. I didn’t blame them for being so angry.

I hear you. I have 2 young people who never feel 'well'. 1 has had Long Covid ('no treatment avail' but is slowly improving over last 24m). This ASD young person is on a 50% timetable in a mainstream school - & still struggling but no specialist places available.

One just gets 'standard' ASD burnout through trying to cope in an NT world.

HCP have nothing to offer except CBT & you can't get appointments anyway.

I moved to Scotland & current school is entirely sensible. Removing the English 'attendance police' from our daily lives has reduced stress & allowed my energy to be used to support attendance. GOVE is an idiot imo.

A parent assaulted you and you 'don't blame them?!' 🙄

It's frustrating and I agree with you that the letters and measures are a blunt tool. Some kids are genuinely unwell and some kids are not and their parents just let them stay off.

I would agree with a pp, give him plenty of additional vitamins. Be pedantic about handwashing, give them sanitiser gel, tell them to step away from people with colds or who mention having been ill as much as they possibly can. Make sure they get plenty of sleep, get your windows open on a daily basis. Feed them plenty. You can't prevent kids from getting ill but some of these things can reduce the chances and reduce the severity. Any medications that might be affecting vitamin uptake?

@ColonelDax have you tried getting any kind of referrals nhs recently? It's taken a year of waiting for my daughter to see someone for bowel issues and she's been waiting 2 years to see someone about her tonsils and adenoids, struggles to breath.
Also some children just don't have a good immune system, and catch everything going. I had measles as a young child and I was ill a lot as a kid and still now as an adult, i catch every bug and I'm normally really ill with it. Plus I suffered with terrible migraine as a teen, to the point it made me sick, no tablets ever worked. I still suffer with them now, but I am now allowed tablets that most of the time work

Our school specifically state if our children require Calpol/Nurofen for an illness then they don't want them in school.
They only accepted my child in school on Calpol because it was for post surgery pain relief, but if your child has cold symptoms that can be managed by Calpol they refuse to have them.

No, I don’t. It was a complex case with a child they were fighting to get a diagnosis for. The school didn’t care. They just cared about attendance.

Getting punched wasn’t fun but the poor woman was at the end of her rope.

And there was me under orders from a fucking ridiculous school policy that I was only following to keep a job I hated because of SLT telling her she had to leave her child who was clearly ill in school until she knew I would be calling her to collect them at 9:30.

I do have compassion for other people, even if they do lamp me out of sheer frustration.

And the way the school I worked in talked about parents was just awful.

They would be accused of all things in the school office, lying about illness etc.

So it’s no wonder some get so frustrated.

@Arthurflecksfacepaint I agree this is my experience, especially with academies. They care so little about the welfare of a child, they only care about stats, grades, attendance.
The child's welfare should always come before anything else.

How is he ill ‘almost constantly’ if he’s well at least 85% of the time?
Op it is ridiculously shit. My dd was extremely ill with scarlet fever. She was on 3 different types of antibiotics for 6 weeks, developed chronic ear infections which left her deaf for a whole year, had secondary skin infections from the rashes it caused. Barely ate, drank or slept for weeks. The school were aware she was sick, but I still got a phone call saying if she took one more day off the education officer would be round. So I tried taking her into school the next day but she had a doctors appointment at half past 8 that morning, she ended up being 10 minutes late for school. The receptionist who is an absolute bitch told me I wasn’t allowed to sign dd in as I hadn’t informed them she was going to be 10 minutes late, and as they had already put the school dinner orders in there’d be nothing for her so I had to take her home?? So the education officer ended up at my house a few days later. When I went in to complain to the head for causing all this extra stress for not allowing my dd in for being 10 mins late, he pulled the receptionist who fucking lied to him and told him she didn’t know what I was taking about!! And that’s why I don’t trust teachers, even though mn thinks they can’t ever do any wrong!!