How is school attendance being recorded?

[fourpeasinapod]

I’m assuming all pupils aren’t being recorded as absent the rest of the year, am I right?

Schools have been told to update their SIMS as if the school is closed. That was until a particular date - can't remember off-hand but I'm expecting an update to come through from DfE when the holidays are over. So no one is expected to be in and attendance is not being tracked, or marked as anything at all as schools are closed.

Attendance for Key Worker children is registered in numbers only with a form on the DfE website filled out by schools - to enable the government to have an idea of how many children attending. Schools will hold their own internal registers checking who is on site/off site on a daily basis but that is for safeguarding not attendance.

@fourpeasinapod

That's just for the foreseeable future in a week by week basis.

No parents really need to worry about this at the moment tho. Schools are closed - shouldn't matter to the general public what codes go in the register.

Attendance recording is hugely important at the moment. There is huge man power going into this. We need to know who is in, who is not, and whether the vulnerable children who are currently entitled to attend are doing so - then this has to be fed back to social care for their assessment of whether this is safe or not. For some children it really won't be safe not to be in school at the moment.

With regards to attendance codes before schools closed; if your child was ill themselves it was the usual I code. If they were self-isolating due to a family member unwell it was a Y code (unable to attend due to exceptional circumstances). Anyone who chose to keep their child at home before schools closed, and they weren't ill and a family member wasn't ill, would have been marked as an O code for unauthorised absence.

I've just checked SIMs. Ours have been marked B, educated off-site. We went back last Tuesday so have had a week of this before Easter and 4 days since.

Key-worker children are signed in manually at the start of each session at reception and a list emailed to staff on the rota that day. We are not teaching them anything, more supervising them as all their work is set online so they are being treated the same as those with non-key worker parents.

You must be very bored to ask that question