Oh, A phonecall from school...........

[DameHermione]

Join me and laugh.

School: DDs attendance last term was only 75%. We're not happy with it.

DH: Do you think we are?

Me:

It was Dh took the call. Oh how I wish it had been me.

Um, , well that's bright of them!

I'm actually speachless and Incandescent with rage.

On the plus (?) side the Healthy Minds people have arranged a meeting at school (in may) with an educational psychologist (which school told me would never happen!). So we'll see what happens after that.

sorry but

Schools AMAZE me.

Best thing to do? email the HT thanking her for the informative phone call of todays date, that DD attendance stands at 75%

State this is a great concern of yours and only confirms that more is needed to be done to support DD to give her the confidence and encouragement and increase her learning potential.

Look forward to discussing this further at our meeting of......

You have then got a bit more towards your paper trail :)

I agree with Coff fire it back at HT and ask her what extra funds she has in her pot that she can give you to enable more things to be put in place to make life at school easier for dd :) bet you won't get any more phone calls!

HT won't know DD exists (big MS secondary). should I email back the SENCo or 'inclusion' teacher? (inclusion is the one we've seen most of and the one that phoned toady about this meeting in may).

Main problem is that they are clueless and don't know what to offer. But then so am I. If I knew why she wouldn't go I could fix it. Even DD doesn't know why she can't go. and until I can say X, Y and Z is wrong, please do A, B and C to help, then they can't do anything.

Even the 'Healthy Minds' woman we saw a couple of months ago said she dodn't know what help to offer and suggested I found a support group for me ()

excuse me while I scream a little mor.............

AHHHHHHHHHHH! I will scream for you.

I would email the school senco keeping her up to date re the phone call.

What can they do? Find out what stresses her each morning. Go through her timetable in casual convo and see if you get any negative responses on any particular subject? It may be particular days she is dreading? You could possibly form some sort of pattern even if she is unaware of it at the moment.

Ask her about friendships. Is there an issue with someone or has she got issues forming friends. maybe a circle of friends could be orgainised.

Find her a carrot to dangle each morning by way of a responsible job to do for the school. Anything that will ease her into the school day.

LOTS they can do :)

done all that. she just hates it. always has, always will. counting the days (all 2 years of them) until she leaves.

I think school need to think themselves lucky it's 75%, 4 year ago DS was 26%, 3 year ago it was 10%, 2 year ago it was nil and a year ago I called in EWO as school weren't doing a thing about it. Good luck.

OK, well it may help to know that the only thing that has triggered this is the new Ofsted inspection criteria. In January they changed the "criteria" ie the main headings. It hasn't really changed what they measure, but it has changed the weighting and one of only 4 main headings is "behaviour and safety" and attendance is a major thing under that heading. Hence ANY school which has ANY chance of an inspection in the next 12 months will be knee-jerk chasing up on attendance. They will just have given a seccy a list of names to call and they are trying to clean up the database in the hopes that they can either mark people as ill when they have them wrongly down as absent, or that they can pressure you to bring your kid in more often and so even if their historical attendance is bad they can show an improvement (statistically). It is unlikely to have anything to do with your kid's circumstances, at all.

If it helps, the advice we had from the LEA chap (ex Ofsted) was that if you have individual child/children with a poor attendance record for good reasons, it is more than reasonable to write a little case study explaining that individual case and then rerun the stats for the inspector leaving that child and kids like them out, to show the "true" numbers. It would be nice to just tell school to do one, but it may be less hassle long-term to help them make this problem disappear from the stats.

interesting.

so i'll just mention the new ofsted rules next time they hassle then. and suggest they recalculate after taking DD's individual circumstances into consideration.

But 'We're not happy with it'. I mean come on! How many years have I been telling them I'm not bloody happy withit?

Some schools really should learn to 'think before they speak'. We had a similar experience at parents evening. A teacher complained that ds did not complete his homework - we had never seen ds bring anything home from that lesson. Further discussions revealed that she always gave homework out on a Thursday afternoon - ds has been put on a reduced timetable so isn't in school then! Cue embarrassed teacher .

no idea.
school said they'd inform education welfare office back last christmas. haven't heard a dickybird since though.

85% is when the education welfare officer gets involved in England.

Do remember though 99% of people have a valid reason such as chickenpox etc. To cover yourself report school anxiety related stress to the GP and it'll go no further re social services.

Often the EWO actually kicks a few butts re school support & to get cahms appointments etc brought forward at this stage so although the initial letter might be a bit scary for Mums like us it often turns out to be a blessing.

Agree EWO arent as scary as they seem. When my eldest LONG time ago had school issues, emotional teenager issues, teacher conflict issues her attendance was really poor. School rang, wrote, hassled etc and threatened with EWO on a lot of occasions.

In the end I phoned them myself and got more support than I expected and so did DD. They dont just take schools word for it, they visit you, talk to the child, encourage the child. At first they thought she was just adamant not to go so visited and picked her up to watch her reaction when they delivered her and talked to her on the way. She was being bullied by teachers, pupils despite her own hormonal issues. They gave her a mentor to run to, put school on the right track and sought her camhs support. I couldnt fault them. So it could well be a string to your bow if you bit the bullet and contacted them yourself. It shows you are concerned (we know it already :)) and it helps the prospect of school support in this rather than "blame the parents first"