To dislike school's attendance competition

[PostmanPatAlwaysRingsTwice]

Our primary school's latest newsletter contains the usual lines about attendance at school being important, which it is. It then goes on to show the attendance statistics since the beginning of term, I think, for each year group. A year contains one or two classes. It's titled 'Attendance Race' and congratulates the class with the best attendance that week.

AIBU to think this is ineffective, unfair and discriminatory? In primary, it's down to the parents to get their DC to school - the children have little to no control over it. If a child is reluctant, it's up to their parent to deal with that and ask school for help if need be (I've been there). Most kids are off because they're ill. What are they expected to do about that? Others are off because their parent didn't get out of bed to take them. The child can't change that. Why make the children get in a race they can't compete in?

Also, it means that children with long term conditions who are more likely to be off may be blamed for their class not winning the race - 'we're not going to be the best because X is in our class and she's off a lot with her diabetes/asthma/Crohn's disease'. Or 'why is your class the worst, Jimmy?' 'because Y is off all the time. We'll never get it because of him.' It's none of the children's business to talk about why one of their class is off. I have skin in the game here - my DD was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes this year and was off sick for a while. Sorry for losing the race for the class 😒Some children will be worried that they're ill and losing their class's position.

Children are off because of health (temp or longer term) that they can do nothing about, or because of additional needs leading to difficulties at school (that the school have a responsibility to help with), or because of difficult family situations such as being refugees/EAL, domestic abuse, mental health or addiction. Those families need support, and are not going to suddenly change because of this attendance race.

School need to focus on children who are persistently absent and work effectively and sensitively with families to support them to get their children into school. Not do this.

AIBU?

Education is important, but school should think about what attendance races are teaching children. It teaches them that presenteeism is more important than productivity. It also teaches them that their own presence whether ill or not is more important than the health and well-being of their class mates (should they pass any sickness bugs on to classmates).

Surely that's not the right lesson to be teaching them?

My Ds was year 11 last year .. school suddenly started putting his appointments as Lates if he came in. After appointment . I have no idea why but his attendance would have looked better if I kept him off the whole morning but been gcse year wanted him in as much as possible.

in primary someone did challenge it under equality and the certificates were stopped .

These prizes are stupid instead of buying a prize put the money into supporting the children with chaotic lives , whose parents don’t get them to school.

The other thing about these yearly rewards … get a sickness bug in September your not going to win an award are you , so then why bother?

Well actually the prizes are used an a incentive for the school to have the best attendance possible. The better the attendance the more funding the school gets - surely a school needs funding to have the best resources for the children? It's not "unavoidable" to have a huge emphasis on attendance, and how the school does it is upto them.

Improvement awards would mean schools are forking out constantly. Not many children will get 100% attendance, but many could improve.

I had loads of time off school - lots of horse shows are week days.
My friends children have lots of time off every year to compete too, which would reduce the whole class attendance, which others would deem unfair but life experience is just as important as education in my opinion

It's the government and Ofsted who put pressure on schools for attendance.
In regards to those with long term illnesses you'll be surprised how caring primary aged kids can be.
My DD has a classmate like this, most of the children understand why this child is absent alot and he's treated like a celebrity by the class when he is well enough to be in school.
They commiserate with him when he's I'll and celebrate his good days with him. After being together for few years now dds class understand why they'll not win the weeks attendance awards, it been explained to them really well that their classmate can't help being unwell and loves coming in when he's feeling good.

Agree with you.

And those poor children with long term health problems and disabilities risk being bullied for pulling their class down in the "race".

I would send an email.

Dear HT,

Thankyou for the recent newsletter.

I agree with you that attendance at school is important.

Can you explain to me how punishing classes who have students with long term health problems and disabilities by publicly shaming their collective attendance is in life with the equalities act?

Thanks

Xxxxxx

The reason I refer to this act is it's about not treating people less favourably due to disability. So absence due to disability causing unfavourable treatment of that group or a whole group is questionable. Especially if there's prizes for winning.

I couldn't agree more. My DD had Long Covid (for which we got zero help from the NHS) and I had staff from school coming round all the time, letters, meetings. In the end I just had to say 'what do you expect me to do? There's no help or support for children with Long Covid, I can't make her not have it and quite honestly I do wonder if this pressure to send her in when she is unwell has possibly lead to the Long Covid as she was not allowed to recover from the COVID.'

I will say though that all this attendance stuff is expected of them and Ofsted look at it, so not necessarily what schools want to do.

But it's an inherently unfair competition, and its a group competition, so those with disabilities or other reasons who bring the total down are open to be blamed by those "marathon runners" whose only attribute is to be lucky.

It's not ok. It can't be ok. It's inherently discriminatory and unfair.

As a secondary teacher, I don't agree with attendance competitions. It's completely unfair to the kids. Some of them genuinely can't help they're attendance. Unfortunately, the pressure to drive up attendance statistics comes from the top. My line manager has already been in to my form and completely undermined me in front of pupils, grilling me about attendance statistics that I have no control over 🙄 he wants me to have regular 'conversations' with pupils and parents. He's under pressure from the head, who then is under pressure from the Academy Trust.

It feels that schools today are driven by statistics and league tables, rather than the children.

This is not about to change any time soon, as the DoE is putting ever more pressure on schools to improve attendance.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1073619/Summary_table_of_responsibilities_for_school_attendance.pdf

School attendance is still not back to pre-pandemic levels, so there is a huge push at the moment to promote ‘good attendance’.

At open evening this week our school went as far as breaking down the number of days and hours missed when attendance is at 90% compared to 95% and how this affects achievement. Seems parent are now being scared into ensuring children are in school.

Not sure where that leaves children with ongoing illnesses and disabilities.

I think it's an awful policy. My DC had pneumonia at school and missed a whole term!

Blame the government/Ofsted, they have unrealistic attendance expectations, leading to this abhorrent practice 😒

Does ANYONE actually agree that this attendance race is fair?!

What pocesses the school to do this?

I reckon the attendance not rising to pre pandemic levels is due to:

1. People can now work from home if their kids are sick. Theres no need to take a annual leave day, so people just think - ah what the hell, day in PJs for both of us! Whereas before they wanted to make sure their kid was REALLY sick to justify being off. (Me... I am "people")

2. In general people are rebelling against "the system" they previously wouldn't have bothered questioning.

3. All those safeguarding fuck ups that went unchecked due to lockdowns and are now coming home to roost!

4. Cost of living is even more ridiculous now than pre pandemic... so even less people can suck up the extra cost of summer holiday prices, leading to kids going on holiday in term time.

Hello People 😀

All of that, plus huge issues with anxiety and school refusal.

Lord knows how it will be solved, other than the poor Headteacher asking that we call her in the morning if there are any issues or use the guidance on the NHS website to decide if they are truly sick enough to be home.

It will be a long road back.

My dd is deaf & I have challenged dd's school on this quoting the DDA & application of it in attendance rewarding system process.
Sometimes i can only get audiology appointments in term-time. She's only ever out of school for max 2hrs & I take her pick her up and take her back but sometimes she misses registration either am or pm. She's not had an actual day off in the last 2 full school years but hasn't been invited to 100% attendance events either year.
They gave her the corrected certificate after my first complaint as if she hadn't had the appt later & then did exactly the same thing again 6 months later.
I'm sure it's not on purpose & they just use their system and would have to think & make a manual adjustment but it's frustrating for dd especially in her words because Mia & Louis didn't even go in on strike day and I did

My sons autistic and has adhd and anxiety. He takes medication for the last 2 and had to attend many child mental health appointments. It is so unfair. Plus he needed an operation which had a 6 week recovery, though he was only off in the end for 3 weeks. His school wrote to me to 'encourage him to improve his attendance'. I was fuming and they changed the wording in the letter after that. It is so insulting.

My children are adults now but I remember them both being in primary school getting called up in the end of year assembly for 100% attendance. Out of the whole school 5 children had 100% and mine were two of them. I have been very fortunate in that my children very rarely get unwell. There were some children in their schools that had health conditions but more that had parents that let them have days off just because their child didn’t want to go to school that day. It’s a certificate, nothing else my children got it once in 14 years of education, I was pleased for them when they got it and the other 13 years they didn’t get it, I never gave it a second thought and neither did my children.

Also, school just vanished for my children for 6 months during COVID. Not a single message to check in even, despite the fact they were aware of safeguarding issues with the children's dad so things weren't exactly straightforward for my children

When school sent a letter about attendance post -pandemic (mine both have a chronic condition needing regular hospital trips) I wrote to the headteacher and pointed out
A) these letters are problematic under the Equality Act -.there wasn't even an acknowledgement the attendance issues might be disability related, yet a quick check of their system would show I provided a hospital letter each time
B) the hypocrisy of leaving me to juggle educating two children and my own full time job in the pandemic without so much as a single phone call or message to check in and yet reverting to these letters at a time when encouraging unwell children into school at the tail end of the pandemic was putting my children's health at risk. School knew I paid for a tutor throughout the pandemic (my job went bonkers) so they know I value education.

To be fair to the head she's made sure I don't get these letters any more

I expect less education focussed parents than me are certainly thinking that if it was fine to stop teaching for all that time in the pandemic then it's fine to take little Jimmy out for the day /let him have a duvet day now

What a silly thing to say.

It’s being enforced. It’s discriminatory and wrong on so many levels.

It is not a competition; it is purely for school statistics and box ticking purposes .A complete load of bollocks.

Thank fuck ours scrapped this shit after Covid.

Part of the issue is that it’s not simply just a certificate now.

One of my DDs ‘won’ a trip to Alton Towers.
A school local here have trips to the cinema, an annual pass for the local small theme park, a day out to the zoo and (somewhat bizarrely given the focus on healthy eating in schools now) a Dominos pizza voucher.

If it was just a certificate it wouldn’t be such an issue.

I genuinely don't understand people who come into threads like this and go "well I don't have disabled kids so it's literally never crossed my mind to think about disability discrimination." Like okay and??

Stop being so reasonable. The amount of times this same thing crops up on here is ridiculous. Wait until its sports day and posters think it's unfair for their child to participate because they aren't sporty. Or the nativity when poor Alison doesn't get to play Mary despite being the best actress in the class, or Alan has to sing a line of a song when he really wanted to be backstage or wanted to play the part of sheep #2.

I would bet a million pounds that you don't have a disabled child and are therefore talking out your arse.

The amount of BS and belittling non-disabled people do to disabled people is beyond the fucking pale, it really is, and to call such nasty bigotry "reasonable"... Jesus how do people go through life like that.

Comparisons with sports day and school plays are obviously a failure of logic since:
a) Entire classes don't get punished if a specific child loses a race or fails to land a role.
b) There's not a school on earth that would force a wheelchair-using child to run hurdles at sports day or a completely deaf child audition for a role in the school musical, whereas there's no such accommodation for attendance.
c) Winning races and landing lead roles aren't mandatory/strongly encouraged (that's obviously physically impossible, as only one person can win a race) whereas 100% attendance is pushed on all pupils.

And this has to be understood within the greater context, which is that the Tory government is aggressively and systemically anti-disabled, and there's an active push to manage disabled children out of the school system entirely. I work in this area, and most people are unaware of the sheer scale and the underhandedness (and the deliberateness) of how badly and illegally many disabled pupils are being treated by the UK school system. Education is a legal right yet so many children are denied their legal right simply because they are disabled.

Making parents feel their children's disabilities are a problem, telling parents its their job to magically make their children not be disabled, threatening parents of disabled children with legal threats or even threats of prison to scare them into withdrawing their children from school, refusing access accommodations, making disabled children feel unwelcome, putting them in situations practically designed to create bullying (like punishing an entire class because they have a disabled pupil), all of this is part of a systemic campaign to force disabled kids out of mainstream education, which is part of the Tory's government's hatred and contempt for disabled people in general.

It's a load of shit.
My brother spent alot of time off school as he has crohns. The school were so arsey about it. Its shocking.

Yabu, it really isn't a big and is a chance for those poor kids whose parents sent them in no matter what to get them out of their way can shine. Don't get the mumsnet angst about it.

It's a naff thing to "shine" for though

The certificate should say "Yay well done you came in when contagious and made loads of other children unwell and probably made our attendance figures worse"