What's your school's attendance policy like?

[listsandbudgets]

DS has just started year 7. We are just 3 weeks into term and we've already had 3 general letters about attendance policies (he's not missed any they're obviously blanket letters.) The school seem obsessed.

If they are ill we are told to let the school know but send them in if they can possibly make it and the school will then decide whether they're well enough to be there. They have no 48 hour police for sickness and diarrhoea either.

Is this normal?

Attendance has plummeted since covid - at least 5% nationally I think

And grades are directly affected by attendance. In our school they measures recent years attendance and mapped it against English Maths grades
100% attendance - average grade 6.7
80% - average grade 6
60% - average grade 5.5
30% - average grade 3

90% attendance is a day off every 2 weeks.

It matters and they are trying to switch peoples' mindset off "bit of a sniffle" = day off. Or, actually it would be easier if we drive up Friday afternoon to Great Auntie Mabel's birthday - we will take the kids out of school. You can only change peoples' mindset by reminding them/setting expectation.

That grade correlation is a pretty strong thing but not that surprising really.

It's not really changing my mindset to be honest as I tend to be the dose them up with paracetamol and send them in sort of parent anyway although I do draw the line at sending them in if they're actually vomiting.

If anything I'm already finding weekly letters about attendance rather irritating so am likely to end up ignoring them and I'm sure I'm not going to be the only one.

My kids are in primary but there's a local authority push to increase attendance so we're getting constant messages and flyers about it, the kids are having assemblies about it etc. Appreciate the importance but I am finding it rather tiresome and it's just resulted in me telling the kids it's my choice whether to take them out of school for a holiday or not, not the schools 😂 (I don't even do this but my point stands!)

I understand the messages are probably tedious - but I think school are having to reset students and parents mindsets. Understandably after years of "yes, be at home for 4 month/2 weeks/7 days/whatever the latest covide rules are. And, with a lot of parents, the only way to do that is to repeat the message.

I am quoting the below from a source at a local School about attendance impacts before the pandemic. If you consider children now need that reset - and have already missed so much school, it is possible the difference good attendance could be even greater.

Data supplied by Sixth Form Colleges Association (SFCA) in their Six Dimension Report 2019: so we are using pre-pandemic data which would seem a realistic data set given that we are returning to the bar of pre-pandemic results.

The data is based on students in SFCA members (sixth form colleges) and the research showed that...'If we extrapolate across a three A level programme, the typical student with attendance below 85% will perform at least two grades lower than a student with attendance above 95%. In competitive university entrance and other contexts, two grades represents a life-changing difference.'
Source: The Sixth Dimension Report 2019 published by SFCA

Schools are under a LOT of pressure from local and national government to improve attendance figures.

I work in a school. We've been instructed by the LA to hammer home attendance policies and expectations. The massive nationwide problem with school attendance has been headline news on many occasions recently, including this week. Surely it's not surprising? I had a phonecall from my daughter's school yesterday regarding her attendance after a couple of days off poorly and a general 'Dear All' attendance letter today.

Agreed that schools are under tremendous pressure to get their attendance rates up this year. We have had several pushy letters since the start of term.

The stats quoted about higher attendance rates=greater exam results royally tick me off. DS, who has had awards for stellar attendance rates since starting Year 7, is predicted pretty piss poor exam results because of his learning difficulties. Meanwhile, his best mate is predicted 8+ on upcoming GCSES despite being taken out on a month long jolly to his home country around Christmas time, each and every year.

The no isolation actually sounds reasonable as they are infectious before they show symptom it's all so contagious anyway. It feels like at this time of year they might aswell scrap isolation get it over with in two weeks vs months of random kids missing lessons.

They aren't allowed to even approve missing the last few days of term in our area despite no academic teaching taking place.

There are several problems with the statistics.

One is that it's an average. There will be substantial overlap in the range of results achieved by each category, and there will be plenty of children who buck the trend.

Another is that correlation does not prove causation. We do not know that grades are directly affected by attendance, just that children with higher attendance also tend to be higher achievers. The causation could be the other way around. Children who are not doing well at school may well be more likely to miss school. By KS4, the kids who are doing well and aiming high will be anxious not to miss too much; the ones who are not looking like getting many passes may well have given up, and will use any excuse to miss their least favourite days.
Or it could be that other factors (eg home background) affect both academic achievement and attendance.

And another is that statistics do not determine whether an individual child would be better off attending or not on any given day. I know someone who has massively underachieved at A-level and this was definitely linked to poor attendance - but she was ill all year, and attending wasn't actually going to help if she wasn't fit enough to get anything out of the lessons.

There are some parents who do need it explaining to them that each time their child is off with a sniffle it gets harder and harder for them to keep up. Whether the letters work, I'm not sure, and they do wind the rest of us up!

The grades v attendance thing really pusses me off, because it’s the symptom of a bigger issue around school/gov education policy pushing every student into a square box exam factory and when they don’t fit for what ever reason it regularly manifests itself as illness in some format. My eldest coped ok and had good attendance, my youngest was assessed as being autistic aged 10 by which point with limited support in school to support her needs her attendance was dropping as she was constantly ill from coping in an environment that doesn’t suit her despite being academically bright,and then a correlation with grades dropping. All Because send funding has been cut to the bone there are 1000s kids out of school because of this! It’s just not as simple as “make them attend at all costs!”.