Attendance - Waddington All Saints Academy

At Waddington All Saints Academy, we believe that good attendance is important to a child’s achievement, wellbeing and their wider development. Attendance is everyone’s responsibility and it is our aim that children come to school every day. By providing a safe, nurturing and stimulating environment, alongside a rich and varied curriculum, we secure good attendance, where children are keen and ready to learn.

Our Attendance Team

deputy Headteacher

Mrs Mandana John

Welfare Officer

Mrs Kelly Dudley

Finance / Admin Officer

Mrs Sarah Fisher

As an academy, we are committed to:

Promote good attendance and create a culture that promotes the benefits of good attendance.
Ensure that every child has access to full-time education, to which they are entitled.
Regular monitoring of registers and data to highlight and address any patterns of absence and address them accordingly
Have a robust daily process to follow up absences
Support our parents to ensure their child attends school every day that it is open, promoting punctuality in attending lessons

Attendance Policy

We believe that, in order to build a culture of good attendance, we must work together and ensure every child attends school every day that it is open.

We ask that parents:

Ensure that their child attends school every day, on time.
Notify the school by telephone or email, by half past nine, on the first day of absence.
Only request leave of absence in exceptional circumstances and please do so in advance.
Wherever possible we ask parents to make dental/doctor appointments outside of the school day; however, on occasion these appointments mean that a child must leave school premises during school time. Please let us know if this is necessary and collect him/her from school. Children are not allowed home on their own during the normal working day unless accompanied by a designated adult.

Procedures for monitoring attendance

We recognise that children may have a legitimate reason to be absent from school, and we are aware that some families face difficulties which may impact on their child’s education.

To ensure a consistent approach across the academy we operate a ‘traffic light’ system when monitoring attendance. The traffic light system helps us to identify families at an early stage, so that we can offer help and support in an attempt to prevent legal action from being taken against parents who fail to ensure that their child attends school. To ensure that we have the full picture we also use attendance data from the previous 12 months when identifying concerns and next steps.

The Green Zone: Pupils with 96% attendance and above- No Action required.

The Amber Zone: Pupils with between 95% – 91% attendance- Attendance is carefully monitored by the academy.

A letters is sent to parents and carers to tell them that their child’s attendance has dropped into the amber zone. If attendance does not improve, parents and carers may be invited into school for a meeting.

The Red Zone: Pupils with below 90% attendance- Attendance will be very closely monitored by the academy. Parents will be invited in to attend an Early Help Assessment attendance meeting. At this meeting, barriers to good attendance will again
be discussed, improvement actions agreed and attendance targets set.

For more information, please see below.

Holidays in Term Time

Parents are politely reminded that pupils have regular opportunities for holiday and that absence from school, for any reason, can have a negative impact on a child’s educational progress and potential achievement.

The Headteacher has the power to authorise pupil absence due to exceptional circumstances, but not to grant holiday entitlement (as of 1/9/13) during term time. A request in advance from a parent to take their child of compulsory school age out of school during term time can only be granted by the school in exceptional circumstances, which could evidentially not take place during the designated holiday periods within an academic year.

It is the responsibility of the requesting parent to evidence the exceptionality of the circumstances. Parents who find themselves unable to take time off during school holidays should discuss this with their employer, not the school. For work commitments to be considered exceptional, the parent would have to be able to evidence unavoidable circumstances, which have prevented them from being with their children, for consecutive school holidays during the year. The Headteacher may determine the number of school days that a child can be away from school, as justified by the exceptional circumstances, for non-attendance during term time.

For further information, visit Gov.UK