Question for those whose school is obsessed with attendance

[MayDayChild]

DD in reception and I'm constantly by this thing called school!!!
For first half term 40% of all school pupils got 100% attendance
I really thought more than that would be at school everyday.
Sickness accepted but 60% of them?
Needless to say my robust been in nursery since 12m old DD has 100%.

Do you think this is high low normal??
They publish attendance for each class on weekly newsletter btw

My GP would find it pretty normal: according to him, it takes most children a few years to develop a strong immune system and some children will be maturing very late in this respect. He thinks schools have a totally unrealistic idea of what a constitutes a normal response to infections. The consultant immunologist I saw said something very similar.

And ime there are more infections in the first halfterm of the school year than at any other time as all these new germs are meeting each other after the holidays.

fwiw I don't think it was very different in my young days in the 60s: some children were never ill, most children were ill occasionally, a few children seemed to be ill all the time my db was in this latter category- but is never ill as an adult so presumably has a tried and tested immune system by now)

Remember that it only requires a child to be absent for a single half day to fall below 100% attendance - a dentist's appointment, a paediatrician's appointment (even if arranged with the full knowledg of the school), a family funeral, a family taking a child out for half a day to attend a wedding, an accident at lunchtime requiring the child to be taken to have a head bump checked up by the GP or hospital ... one bout of D&V, 1 temperature, one asthma attack ....

I would say 40% for the first half term in school is on the low side of normal. Remember that many of these children will be below compulsory school age (assuming a single sept start) and many parents do take a somewhat more relaxed attitude to attendance for the very little ones.

I would expect it to rise as the year goes on.

They're recording attendance in reception? When legally children do not have to attend school until the term after they're 5? At a time you can legally pull them out to go on holiday? I'm sure that's illegal under the Data Protection Act. What if they're a truant in secondary school and this gets taken into account when it shouldn't have even been recorded?

For god's sake - children get ill when they are young - it is part of life! Why on earth are they recording attendance when children are in reception? Totally mad. Do you expect parents to send children in with stomach bugs, ear infections, coughs etc?

It could have something to do with their offsted report. My dcs school is always marked down on attendance because they do authorise some absences for holidays etc. The head accepts that sometimes it's better to take kids out of school for a holiday rather than them not having a holiday at all, (obviously because holiday prices are lower during term time). So to help their stats they try their best to keep kids in school as much as possible, (eg they will administer any medicines you bring in etc,) & so with these types of policies they may appear 'obsessed' with attendance figures, but really it's down to offsted.

each child only has to have one absence to be taken away from 100% attendance.

they're not all off all the time.

Agree with nickelbabe, it is fairly likely that many children had 1 day or 1 half day off and therefore dipped below 100%. But I would say this is pretty low. I my experience I would expect more attendence in the first half term and less in the second. Children go back to school well rested and strong. The cold weather often doesn't hit until after the first half term and parents are less likely to keep children off for treats as they have had them all summer. (This is one of the most likely reasons for children to be off in my experience, Mondays and Fridays some children will always be off with 'colds' and then bounce up to you on Tuesday and tell you what a lovely weekend they had a seaside and how they're going again next week...parents really over estimate their children's ability to lie!!)

If they are printing them every week that suggests, if the figures alone dont (!) that they have had problems in the past and are trying to rectify them. As I said above some schools really struggle because they have a high percentage of families who do seasonal work (moving around), farm (need the children at home or children have been up half the night lambing) or traveler families (again moving around). And some just suffer because the parents couldn't care less. (The other reasons mentioned not included in this group!)

and some schools do less well in the statistics because they have a really good record on pastoral support and so attract all the parents of children with chronic health problems/disability/emotional or mental health problems etc

the recent Ofsted report noted that dcs' over-subcribed secondary has a higher than average proportion of children with SN and disabilities- it's because they're all queuing to get in and doing anything to avoid the clueless school down the road

Good for you :-/

I don't know why schools are obsessed with attendance - especially as they seem to spend a lot of time doing precisely nothing (well d3 does at her state primary in year 1).

I'll be taking her out for a day to go and collect the new puppy, and I take her out every now and again if we have special family things to do. 100% attendance means nothing to me! It's different when they get to year 3+.

My dd2 has also had 100% attendance - she has been in nursery since two years, and is naturally robust, high pain threshhold etc. She's not particularly tired at the end of a school day either.

DD1 on the other hand needed a day off every 2-3 weeks, was exhausted at the end of each day and still was in Y2. She seems stronger now (Y3) but still had a day off last term, plus came home early on another day. Different kids have different susceptibilities to bugs and react differently.

And some need the odd day off to maintain their equilibrium. And who cares anyway!

the percentage should improve over the rest of the yar.

It always looks worse in the first term.

For instance if you had the wnet on the first day and had the second off, then it would be 50% attendance. If you continued to go for the rest of the first week it would be 80$ attendance.

So out of the more days in the year and even having a few off it would still improve.

Good logic yardbroom!
I personally thought it was low. Yes they are tackling it re ofsted.
They do lots of weird things for ofsted, they went down this year.
It's a greater London school. No lambing!! Or travellers I know of!

I would say attendance means much more below about year 4. Before this they have little ability to ask about bits they have missed, work in pairs or groups to catch up or to find out work for themselves (as they might be expected to do at secondary). When I taught year 1 I had a child who was routinely off on Mondays as he had been at his Gran's caravan over the weekend. This meant he missed the new sound which we did every Monday and was always behind in phonics on the weeks he was off. It also meant the TA had to be devoted to him on Tuesdays when she could have been doing other things. I found it difficult to address with parents as they would insist he had been ill, even when he wrote 'on Monday I swam in the sea' in his day book!

However, I don't think theres anything wrong with the odd day off for special things. I dont personally think 100% is absolutely necessary. Happy hacker schools care because it is something they are judged on. When only certain things are published about a school (results, attendance, SEN) is unsurprising that they think these things extremely important.

I thought it was the case that, although you child does not have to attend school at all before the statutory age, once you have registered and started them at a school, they then have to attend like any other school attending child.

Ofsted looks at attendance because poor attendance affects progress. Ofsted expects all the children to make progress. Attendance below a certain % will limit what a school can achieve in an inspection report because Ofsted will read this as insufficient progress being made by individuals or groups of children.

The problem of course is that Ofsted expects all children to be able to make progress at exactly the same rate under exactly the same circumstances. Because a purely numerical approach to progress cannot take into account individual circumstances such as poor health or necessary medical procedures. WHich means that a school with a number of children with e.g. regular hospital appointments or recurring illnesses will be penalised. Which in its turn means that some schools will do their best to discourage the parents of such children from applying. Which in its turn will result in some other school picking up the slack.

Thing is, it's not the % with 100% that matters - if nobody got 100% but EVERYBODY got 99%, then that would still represent excellent attendance.

It's when 40% got 100% but the other 60% only averaged 75% that a problem would arise..

100% attendance percentage on its own means very little. It's the overall attendance percentage - is it 90% on average? 85%? 80%? Less? - that indicates whether the school has a genuine attendance 'issue' (I nearly put 'problem', but it may be entirely explicable if e.g. 20% of the school are travellers who are only settled in that area for a few weeks each term but are registered at that school)

My granchildrens' school demand a doctor's note for any illness...or they fine you £50!
And they say D&V is not a readon for non attendance.
Thoses poor GPs' in the area...chocablock with loads of coughs,snots and virus'

ok am I the only one slightly gobsmacked that a child would be kept off for picking up a puppy???

for me attendance is important partly because of missing work etc that they then need support to catch up on

but also because it teaches them a sense of responsibility and work ethic

there are lots of days when I can think of something much more fun to do than go to work but I go because I have to -kids go to school, because they have to!

I'm with you, workshy ... but picking up a puppy is far from the worst i've heard.

There is also the difficulty that families who can afford holidays are sometimes away from school for a week or even two at a time - whereas those (many in my school) families who have no annual holiday at all but might have a special event lasting a day are criticised because that 1 day thing seems so 'trivial' (like picking up a dog, or going to a local fair which is a big thing for a particular ethnic group within the school)

It's not the schools - its the EWO (Educational Welfare Officers) who are putting the schools under immense pressure - registers have to be perfect and all absences have to be chased up.

It's just one of those things. FWIW dd and ds1 (dd now in yr 4 and ds1 in yr1) have never had 100% attendance. If they're ill I don't send them. Why would I?

So ds1 had 3 days off this half term because he had an asthma like attack (out of the norm - never usually has breathlessness, ended up with 2 nights in hospital being nebulised and then on 4 hourly inhalers. The school said they would rely on him to remind them of when next inhalation due, and frankly I felt that was unlikely to happen, so he missed the day after we got home, a Friday, too).

Last term dd had her tonsils out. 2 weeks off school, dictated by the consultant.

She also had d&v for 2 days the previous term, and then there's the 48 rule to follow after.

So when some ridiculous mascot character turns up at school to hand out the 100% attendance awards, well - they were never going to get them. Still managed 98% apparently (not sure if the stats were pulled before dd had her op).

But I will not, and absolutely refuse to, send my children to school if they are not well enough to be there, and IMO if more people did this, particularly wrt d&v there'd be fewer bugs doing the rounds especially at this time of the year.

don't get me wrong, if mine are ill they don't go to school, and I do follow the 48 hr rule but I've heard all sorts of reasons for kids being off...

they were a bit tired
it's their birthday
their brother is coming back from a school residential and they want to see him
blackpool lights are on and we'll miss the traffic if we set off before school kicks out
want to go christmas shopping and it's too busy at the weekend
the cat's gone missing
etc etc etc

it's nonsense

In our case it was the school putting pressure on the EWO not the other way round: HT was desperate for an Ofsted Outstanding so needed to improve attendance record. They also kept calling in SS re our parenting despite the fact that they had letters from several paediatric consultants, the occupational therapist, the GP and the school doctor all explaining that dd's medical absences were inevitable. I'm sure the HT can't have thought all those medical professionals were incompetent or lying through their teeth: our very strong feeling was that he hoped we would be so stressed by the constant investigation that we decided to move schools, thus improving his attendance figures.

Even the EWO wrote in our support and the HT was still not happy.