I'm overthinking this...

[Galena]

DD's school is running an attendance 'thing' whereby the class with the highest percentage of attendance wins the cup for that week, and gets 15 minutes of Golden Time.

DD's class were second today with 99% The winning class had 99.6%

Great - considering attendance last year was around 94% over the year, these are fabulous results. BUT, DD's class only has 22 children, where the class that won this week (and for the previous 2 weeks) has 30 so, statistically speaking, one absence in DD's class leads to a bigger percentage drop than one absence in the other class.

I know, I'm overthinking it. I shall get a grip.

Yes you are overthinking it.

Overall, it still works at getting attendance up.

I think it's a good compromise. People seem to loathe individual prizes for attendance, so this seems a good way to make it a team effort. Nothing to be done about the class sizes, sadly!

With those percentages, the bigger class had one session missed, the smaller class had 2 sessions missed. So even if you come up with another way of calculating it, it seems fair this week.

Yes, I guess it probably is fair - and I did tell you I was overthinking it.

But they have more children...so they could potentially have 8 more children off than your DD's class could.

My school does this. There are many reasons why it could be construed as unfair... My class has one child still on role who went back to Poland because of a family emergency, and we don't know if they are coming back. But they still count towards our attendance. And we have a child with chronic, life-threatening asthma who often misses days. I could argue that it's unfair... . But mainly what it does is give the children a really strong message that attendance at school is important. End of. My little lot don't stress about it. They are rewarded for a whole fleet of different stuff, individually and as a group. There are better battles to fight.

I'd just be happy that my dd was in a class of 22 - more individual attention than a class of 30, presuming that they have the same number of teachers.
How come there is such an imbalance between the two classes?

I hate attendance awards. What's the point? Being ill or well just happens, nothing to do with effort or merit. And I don't want parents to take ill kids in to school earlier than they should just for an attendance award! And if you're a travelling family, away from school 100 days a year, or have a chronically ill child in the class, the class will never win. Chuh.

I shall stop overthinking it :)

The school's PAN used to be 15. There would be a small YR and then split 1/2, 3/4, 5/6. A few years ago the LA needed more places, so the school took 20-25ish for a few years which are separate classes. This year, PAN has changed to 30 and YR has 30. Now, there is just 1 split class - 4/5 which has 30. Then there are 17 in y6, 22 in y1 and varying numbers throughout the rest of the school.

Oh, and absences due to long-term medical issues do not count.