AIBU to think 100% attendance awards are fundamentally unfair?

[Nijiko]

My child has severe asthma and is on immunosuppressants, so occasional school absences are just part of life for us unfortunately. Hospital appointments can only be taken in school hours, and when they catch a bug they don’t easily “bounce back” in a couple of days like many other kids do. Even a simple cold can wipe them out.

So yes, I have to keep them home a bit longer if something nasty is going round. Because they need to recover properly and risk ending up back in hospital.

But what’s upset me is the attendance awards at school.

My child has never had one and realistically never will. Not because they don’t try hard at school or because we don’t value education. But because their body is disadvantaged.

The awards were handed out last week and my child just sat there knowing, yet again, they’d never be one of the children called up. To be honest, they knew that they wouldn't before the school year even started.

And honestly? It is a slap in the face constantly for them due to something they can't control. I find that heartbreaking.

I know schools are under pressure about attendance, but I can’t help feeling these awards mostly reward children for being healthy/lucky enough not to get ill.

And I also think they encourage people to send poorly kids in. We all know families who dose them up with Calpol and hope for the best.

Our school makes us evidence every medical appointment. When I was young, if you were sick your parents were trusted advicate. Sometimes it feels like parents are treated as guilty until proven innocent if they keep an ill child off school - to protect them and other kids from getting sick.

Maybe I’m overthinking it. But I don’t really understand why children should be publicly rewarded for something other children, through absolutely no fault of their own, can literally never achieve. It feels like health discrimination. I would much rather see children rewarded for exceptional efforts in their learning.

AIBU?

Of course it’s not fair. I don’t think anyone would argue that it is in any way fair.

Plenty of things at school are ‘not fair’ but at least they serve a very important purpose, which is to teach children that some things in life are not fair. I’m not being facetious, I struggle to think of a more important life lesson for going out and trying to trying to make it in the world. Is there a bigger source of anguish and sadness than the expectation that life be fair, with no injustice and inequality?

So I would drop the victim mentality and take this in your stride, OP, and help your child to do likewise. It’s part and parcel of existing in this world. 😊

The problem also is this attitude follows into the workplace.

and then society moans those with chronic health conditions or disabilities can’t or don’t work.

Well if no one’s willing to recognise the contribution they can and do make ……

Children with disabilities/chronic medical conditions don't need school to teach them that life isn't fair. They live it every day.

Are these a new thing? I'm early 40s and my mum never let me have a day off. Sadly there were no awards.

It's discrimination for those with disabilities. I don't know how schools get away with it, especially the ones that do full on rewards(like an ice cream van) the kids with disabilities would have it lauded in front of them like they should just try harder to be less disabled!

My daughter didn’t get these as she had medical appointments etc but it didn’t bother her as she understood why she didn’t.

She was far more bothered by not getting the headteacher awards, form teacher awards, subject prizes, effort prizes etc because she knew that someone had made a decision that she shouldn’t.

@Shinyandnew1 It’s 100% the fault of the school! These awards are not foisted on them from above! Get creative! SLT are 100% lazy if they cannot see that there are other ways to improve attendance that isn’t so blatantly discriminatory.

My DDs are lucky enough to rarely be ill enough to stay off school. They got a fair few 100% attendance awards, though I would like to be clear that I've never like the awards for all of the reasons given by others above.

When their grandfather died, they missed a day of school for his funeral. I asked that this be disregarded for DD2's attendance. Her teacher felt this was reasonable and agreed to put it to the headteacher, who declined. I lost a bit of respect for the headteacher as a result and wasn't as fussed about DD2's attendance for the rest of the year.

I know that building a good relationship with parents is important to schools. Some parents seem to easily flip to quite an adversarial stance with their DC's school. I do wonder if pissing people off with attendance awards does more harm than good.

I'd also like to see proper trials of all of the different tools used to improve behaviour. We should be following an evidence base, not just doing things that 'feel like they might make a difference '.

For those that have airborne allergies, it is obviously safer to have no nuts at all in an environment where lots of the population may be unaware of what in their lunch does/doesn’t have nuts and the importance of good hygiene. Fab that your son isn’t affected in that way 🤷🏻‍♀️

it’s a weird attitude to have that people shouldn’t have reasonable adjustments made to protect them in preventable scenarios. Do you want to go back to when doorways weren’t wide enough for wheelchairs for example & just teach wheelchair users that not every place needs to be accessible to them? No braille for blind people? No disabled parking? maybe go the whole hog and do away with wheelchairs and prosthetics 🤷🏻‍♀️

Surprisingly, they aren't particularly new.

Yup, my DS was absent for 1 day in September as it was his grandfather’s funeral. As a result of that there is no possibility of him getting the 100 percent attendance reward.

It seems really rotten to penalise a kid for having the temerity of having a family member pass away.

Every year the same thing. Generally it’s a certificate. My children were fortunate not to be particularly sickly children. In all the years of education from reception until the end of the sixth form on one occasion they both received 100% attendance certificates. And I never sent them to school if they were unwell. There were 5 children in the whole school that year who received the certificate and two were mine. Hardly a case of one poor child missing out. 454 didn’t get a piece of paper with their name on and 5 did. I don’t see how it can bother you so much.

I agree

I am sorry that your daughter was treated that way. Relationships with parents should really be the cornerstone of good attendance.

It’s pretty clear these awards are being used as an attendance tool rather than recognition for hard work or achievement. The reliance on rewards/bribery honestly smacks a bit of desperation.

As others have said, turning up to school is the most basic expectation.

It is unfair tool and likely an ineffective one too. I agree that developing an actual evidence base for improving attendance in a healthy and supportive way makes far more sense.

And part of that has to be recognising that some absences - particularly around chronic health issues - simply cannot be solved by pressure, rewards or demands.

Perhaps this will be enough incentive for any future relatives to be buried only in the school holidays then if he nags you enough about it.

@OrangeMochaFrappuccino So that school clearly isn’t making a difference on improving attendance then! Was that primary? The school is operating a cheap to run system but still has widespread attendance issues. This 100% explains why rewards are a poor policy. What were they doing for the 454 who didn’t attend 100% and how many were below 90%?

Since the stick of sanctions for non attendance seems to have minimal effect, the carrot of prizes might prove more effective

Rewarding good behaviour (even if it’s really a bit of a bare minimum that is expected) might lead to a culture change somewhere with high levels of absence. If the prospect of a reward means that someone makes a different choice to skive then that’s not a bad thing.

it is unfair on the ill children that they can’t specifically get a prize for attendance, but there are other things available

Attendance awards aren’t a new phenomenon. My eldest is 22 and she had them - school attendance has declined since she was at school so clearly carrot isn’t working either.

perhaps it’s because it’s not always possible, with the best will in the world, to attend every day at school, for every child….

100% agree @Nijiko My DC used to call the 100% Attendance Award the 'Dork Award!' 😆

Yay, here kid, have an award for not getting sick or ill. Big whoooop! 🙄

I wouldn’t say that just because 5 children received a certificate that means the school had poor attendance. As far as I’m aware the majority of children will at some point in the school year be unwell and have at least one day off. I can’t say that I ever really gave it much thought as I’m not interested in any other child’s attendance except my own. Looking at the attendance rate of the school currently it’s 95.7% and persistent absence (10 days+) 8.1%

Just because a child isn’t going to get an award/prize/certificate doesn’t mean that nobody should get one.

My sister (age 26) is still raging she got flu in year 11 which broke her 100% attendance streak. She is a loveable dork

however, anecdotally, I have a colleague who has very much facilitated her sons school refusal - up until he discovered the attendance awards and now is fixated.

my partner is a teacher and the absenteeism
is beyond a joke, I think they’d bribe them with iPads and Xboxes if funding were available to keep bums on seats

How shit attendance awards are depend on how the school deal with them. Especially in primary school.

A school that uses them alongside other awards that children can achieve are quite shit. They are unimaginative. DD1s school did this - lots of awards, same prize value and it lessened the impact of the attendance award on those who were never able to get it.

DD2s school I had a row with over them. Their prize for the attendance award was a (rather expensive!) trip to a theme park. There were no other awards given. So children with medical issues, bereavements or neglectful parents had no chance of ever winning, and the prize was well worth winning. It was outright discriminatory.

It wasn’t until the HT heard some children talking about how unfair it was that Miss Y, a teacher who’d had time off sick (unbeknown to the children for a miscarriage) got to go on the trip, but the kid in their class who had a board fall on them in assembly (so totally not their fault) and ended up having the next day off after getting stitches didn’t, that he truly realised how the children saw unfairness in it.

I think that headteachers should be expected to explain directly to children why they think that it is reasonable for them not to get an attendance award due to unavoidable absences.

A few conversations along the lines of:

"I'm sorry you have a lifelong disability that causes you to miss school for medical appointments along with significant pain and multiple operations, but I think it is reasonable for you to have these absences counted against you because..."

Or "I'm sorry your grandfather died, but your parents really should have delayed his funeral for 6 weeks, because that day is the difference between educational failure and success. Therefore it is reasonable that you don't get the award, for something completely out of your control and obviously distressing for you."

I'd love to see how many headteachers are willing to have those conversations and continue the awards in their present form.

At the moment it is parents having the conversations, which probably range from "life's not fair" to "the school staff are heartless bastards". Surely it would be better for the school to have those conversations and control the narrative.

It would be a bold parent of a child with an allergy to airborne nut particles to send them to even a nut-free school. My kids' school has coconut on the menu frequently (ffs - apparently it's a fruit more than it's a tree nut...) and there are loads and loads of children who bring pb&j sandwiches for after school, granola bars with lord knows what in them, chocolate bars... The school is for children aged 3-18. There's no way every single child abides by the rule.

I'm not responding to your second paragraph, it's utter nonsense.

And yet you did in fact respond 😂