Attendance

Coming to school every day is very important for your child.

Research has shown that children with poor attendance:

• Find it harder to make and keep friends
• Are less likely to gain good qualifications
• Earn lower wages
• Have a higher chance of being unemployed
• Have low self-esteem

Children who miss school miss lessons. These lessons are not repeated, so children will have gaps in their learning. Additionally, often each day’s lessons build upon those of the previous day – if a child misses a lesson they can miss the foundation to subsequent lessons. Children could begin to struggle and achieve less.

Attendance is related to achievement:
The better the attendance, the better the achievement.

If your child is away from school for more than 9 days a year they will not have ‘Good’ attendance. They will have missed 45 lessons!

This means your child can only miss one day every half-term to get good attendance.

• If a child misses only one day each week, by the end of the school year they will have missed 39 days of school – thats the same as missing 8 weeks worth of lessons!
• If they did this for two years they will have missed the equivalent of nearly half a year of school!
• Looking ahead, 90% of young people with absence rates below 85% fail to achieve five or more good grades of GCSE and around one third achieve no GCSEs at all.
• Further more, poor examination results limit young people’s options and poor attendance suggests to colleges and employers that these students are unreliable.<1>

It is important from an early age to get into the habit of attending school!

Additionally, while children are absent, friendship groups are formed within school and children can feel left out when they return.

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Of course, it’s better to be late to school than to not arrive at all. However, we always encourage punctuality at school. Not only is it a good habit to learn from an early age (it will help them when they come to have a job later in life), but being on time is also important for a child because:

• it helps them settle into the school day well, with everybody else
• it helps them make and keep friends
• it improves self-confidence
• class teachers often include learning sessions during registration

In fact, by regularly arriving late, children can miss a lot of learning time!

• Arriving 5 minutes late every day adds up to 3 days lost each year
• Arriving 15 minutes late every day is the same as being absent for nearly 2 weeks a year
• Arriving 30 minutes late every day is the same as being absent for 18 days a year

Being on time is important!

Some other reasons being late is a bad thing include:

• It can be embarrassing
• It can damage a child’s confidence
• It may lead to children being confused and missing vital instructions, information and bits of news at the start of the day
• It disrupts everyone else’s learning