Attendance

Parents and guardians are legally required to ensure their children are in school every day. Our attendance target as a school is 96%.

 

We as a school aim to be fair and consistent in our attendance policy. We will keep parents informed if their child’s level of attendance falls and will write to you if your child’s attendance percentage drops to a level that causes concern. Our Pastoral Lead, Mrs Baker, is always available to meet with parents who are having any difficulties with their child attending school for whatever reason. An Education Welfare Officer is also linked to the school to discuss any absence concerns.

 

penalty notice fines for school attendance parent flyer.pdf

 

Absences will be unauthorised if we don’t hear from you with a valid reason for your child not being in school. Birthdays, shopping for uniform, having no one to bring them, are not valid reasons. Fixed penalty notices will be issued by Suffolk County Council for unauthorised absences.  Information about changes to Fixed Penalty Fines introduced by the DfE in August 2024 are on this page. 

 

The register is taken promptly at 8.50am and 12.45. Late marks are monitored and passed to the Education Welfare Officer when they reach an unacceptable level (6 lates). If your child is late by more than 15 minutes (arriving after 9.05 am or 1pm) the session will be classed as an unauthorised absence and will count towards a Penalty Notice.

 

Our expectation of you as parents is that you keep us informed of your child’s whereabouts at all times if they are not in school. This means a phone call each day by 8.30am to inform us of any illness, stating the nature of the illness.  Phone calls need to be made on every day of absence. If your child is ill for more than two days,  we would expect a visit to the GP.  Evidence of medical appointments may be required in some circumstances. 

 

We expect that routine medical appointments such as dentists, opticians, doctors etc are made outside of school hours wherever possible. If you have an unavoidable appointment in school time we will authorise one session of absence for that appointment (one registration session, either am or pm).

Holidays cannot be authorised apart from very exceptional circumstances. Funerals are authorised for close family members, as are music/dance exams or similar. We would expect notice of these events for the school diary.

 

If you are having difficulties regarding attendance, please talk to us. We want to work together to ensure your child is in school at all times.