Absence Due to illness

[SchoolAbsence]

A few weeks ago, my DD’s teacher spoke to me about my daughters attendance, it’s about 85%, prior to that I had a warning letter that if her attendance did not improve, they would have to get the local authority involved. I have explained all absences are due to illness, we’ve had sickness bugs, Covid, chicken pox and general illness. She has been off again since, high temp, sickness and cough, so she can’t be in school, so what exactly do the local authority want me to do, send a sick child into school? I am behind with my work this week and have had to cancel an appointment, the illness is out of my control.

They're obliged to send letters at certain points; just don't take it too personally. Dh calculated that on normal absence levels, most children will go below the 85% at least once in their school career!

I started a thread about the exact same issue ! It’s infuriating isn’t it . My ds has 82% attendance

We had this mentioned at one point, with a very apologetic comment about it just being procedure from a teacher when she knew it had been flagged.

My DS had Covid and chickenpox within a couple of months of each other. School was totally understanding, the teacher had already popped around on both occasions with some work and stood down our drive for a few minutes chat!

Don’t take it personally, there’s tons of kids that have unusually high absence due to Covid and catching chickenpox too really gives no wiggle room to catch any “normal” sickness bugs either!