Attendance

School Attendance – Key Information

It is important that children attend school regularly to gain the best education possible and enable them to achieve to their full potential. Children who regularly miss days of school can struggle to keep up with their school work and often miss out on the social side of school life which can affect their ability to make and keep good friends.

Regular lateness is disruptive to a child (and other children in class) and it can affect a their education as they miss out on the vital routines and the first part of the education for the day. They may also start the school day unsettled and find it more difficult to concentrate on their learning.

Please read and familiarise yourself with our Attendance Policy:

Attendance Policy

School procedures including for absence:

The gates open at 08.45am each day.
The doors close at 08.55am each day.
Outside of these times you must bring your child in through the main office and sign them into school using the ipad.
Children arriving from 08.55am to 09.10am will be marked as late.
Children arriving after 09.10am will be marked as unauthorised for the morning session.
At the end of the day children should be collected promptly at the following times:

Reception: 3.15pm

Years 1 and 3: 3.25pm

Years 2 and 4: 3.30pm

If your child is not well please contact the school as soon as possible. We recommend that all parents download the Studybugs app and register for the service - click here to visit their site. Once registered, you can notify the school of any absence through the app.
Alternatively, you may email or call the school office on office@watlinglower.org.uk / 01582 662232 option 1 and leave a clear message with the child’s name, class, reason for absence and how long you expect them to be off school for.
Absences should be reported as soon as possible on the first day of absence. If your child child has an illness with a predetermined quarantine period, we will authorise the absence for that period and you will not need to keep notifying us of the absence for the subsequent days.
If you do not know how long your child will be ill for, or if the illness extends beyond the inital quarantine period, please notify us for every day of additional absence.

Procedure for unreported absences

The procedures below set out the day when each action will be initiated by the school. However, each will be repeated in the intervening days before the next step is taken.

Day 1: Any unreported absence will marked on the register as ‘no reason reported for absence.’ The Studybugs app will automatically generate a message to parents asking for a reason for the absence. Please note that there can be a delay between the app reading the registers and sending the notification. This means that a parent who notifies us after 9.30am may still receive a Studybugs notification.

If an explanation for the absence is not received by 10.30am, we will phone parental contacts that we hold a number for.

Please note that if we do not have a satisfactory explanantion for an absence, the registers will be amended with the absence being changed to unauthorised.

Day 2-3: If we still have not heard from you regarding your child’s absence, we will phone all of the contact numbers that we hold for your child.

Day 3-5: If we still have no explanation for the absence of your child, we will visit your address to carry out a welfare check.

Day 10: Your child will be reported to the Local Authority as a Child Missing Education.

Medical and Dental appointments

These appointments, where possible, should not be scheduled during the school day.
When this is unavoidable, children should only be taken out of school for the minimum time required to travel to, attend and travel back from the appointment. However, if the appointment overlaps with lunchtime, you may return them for the start of the afternoon session which is 1pm for Year R and KS1 and 1.20pm for KS2.
If a child is attending an appointment over lunchtime, you must make sure that they are fed before returning to school.
Unless an appointment is first thing in the morning, children should still arrive at school for morning registration. Please inform the school office of when you will need to collect your child for their appointment.
If your child is expected to attend regular appointments due to a medical condition, please discuss the circumstances with the school office.

Absence due to illness

When a child is too unwell to attend school, please inform the office and the absence will ,in a majority of cases, be authorised.
For children who have vomited or had a case of diarrhoea, they must be kept off from school for a period of 48 hours from the last episode.
For children with infectious diseases, they need to be kept off from school until they are no longer contagious. This will be different for different illnesses and we will be able clarify how long children are expected to be absent when you inform us of the illness.
Children with coughs and colds should be attending school as normal. We have an abundant supply of tissues and patience. We would much prefer they came to school.
If you are in any doubt about whether your child is well enough to attend, we encourage you to bring your child to school as they often improve once they are settled. If they are too unwell to remain, we will call you to come and pick them up.

Please note: avoid telling children that you will pick them up if they are unwell. They are more likely to settle if they believe that they are in school for the duration of the day.

The Headteacher is responsible for authorising all absences from our school including for illness. If a suitable explanation is not given, or repeated illnesses occur the headteacher has the right to ask for further proof of a medical situation before authorising an absence.
We want to work with parents and it is highly unusual that children with complicated medical issues are not known to the school. However, we encourage parents to discuss any issues relating to your child’s health that will affect their attendance.
If the Headteacher is not satisfied that sufficient proof has been presented to explain an absence, then it will be unauthorised. These absences will contribute to the overall absence record of a pupil and if they accrue 10 or more sessions of unauthorised absence in a 12-week period, a Fixed Penalty Notice can be issued.

Absence Monitoring

The school continuously monitors the absence of children so that we can intervene early when attendance is dropping. Our Studybugs app is set up to also generate automatic notifications when your child's attendance rates drop below certian trigger points which are set out below:

Trigger 1: below 94% - this alert is intended to draw your attention to a low attendance rate that will have a significant impact on your child's education if it stays at this level. In the Autumn term it is possible for a child's attendance to drop this low after only a couple of days absence because the total number of school days is lower. However, we would expect the attendance to rise and continue to rise over the rest of the term.

{Pupil First Names}’s attendance for the school year has now fallen to {attendance this year}.

We are concerned this level of absence could have a detrimental effect on {Pupil First Name}’s learning.

We of course understand that the reasons, such as illness, might not be within anyone’s control. However, we hope we can count on your support to encourage {Pupil First Name}’s attendance wherever possible.

We are here to help and if you’d like support in helping {Pupil First Name} to attend school then simply reply to let us know.

Kind regards

Trigger 2: below 90% - This is a very concerning level of attendance unless there are mitigating circumstances. As outlined above, we are likely to have already discussed the reason behind your child's absences and will expect their attendance to improve. The Attendance Officer may well contact you at this point.

{Pupil First Name} has missed {absence this year} of school sessions this year.
We are concerned this level of absence is having a serious detrimental effect on {Pupil First Name}’s learning.

We would like to invite you to meet with our Headteacher Mr Cook, to discuss what can be done to improve matters and how the school might be able to help.

Please reply to this email or call the school office on 01582 662232 to arrange a face-to-face meeting.

You are at risk of being classed as a ‘persistent absentee’ which can lead to a fixed penalty notice and the Local Authority’s Educational Welfare Officer may also want to investigate.

Continuing absence below 90% - When a child's attendance is below 90%; not improving and we are not satisfied that there is a medical condition that is preventing your child attending school, we may ask for medical evidence before we authorise further absences. This means that in the event of a future absence you will need to provide evidence of the illness, otherwise the absence will be marked as unauthorised. This can make it more likely that a fixed penalty notice will be issued. At this point, the Attendance Officer will definitely make contact if they haven't done so already.

Fixed Penalty Notices

Applying for a Fixed Penalty Notice is always a last resort for a school and we would much prefer to work with our parents to understand the issues behind your child’s absence. However, we reserve the right to issue a fine to families that are not actively engaging with the school to improve their child’s attendance and for those who take children out of school for a term time holiday.

A Fixed Penalty Notice is applied when a child has 10 sessions of absence over a 10-week period. It is important for parents to understand that the morning is one session and the afternoon is another. This means that 5 complete days of unauthorised absence will lead to a Fixed Penalty Notice.

The 10 sessions do not have to be consecutive and the 10 weeks is a rolling period. This means that any unauthorised absence can be added to other unauthorised sessions before and after in reaching a total of 10 for a fine. The 10 weeks refer to school weeks and they can span across school holidays and the school years.

When a child arrives late after the registers close (9.10am), they are given an unauthorised mark for the whole morning session. This means that a child who is regularly late to school will be accruing unauthorised sessions of absence that could lead or contribute to a fixed penalty notice.

The Fixed Penalty Notice is applied to both parents, even when they do not live together because both parents have respnsibility for ensuring a child attends school.

A person who is not a biological parent may still be fined. This is because a ‘parent’ is defined in Section 576 of the Education Act 1996 as:

All biological parents, whether they are married or not
Any person who, although not a biological parent, has parental responsibility for a child or young person

Any person who, although not a biological parent, has care of a child or young person (having care of a child or young person means that the child lives with and is looked after by that person, irrespective of what their relationship is).

The Fixed Penalty Notice is £80 per parent and it rises to £160 if not paid within 21 days (please note that this is an increase for the new school year 2024-25).

A new development is that from the autumn term 2024, only two fines can be issued to the same parent for the same child within a three-year rolling period. The second Fixed Penalty Notice will automatically be charged at £160 with no reduction for early payment.

A third breach would see further action being taken such as a parenting order or even prosecution. If you’re prosecuted and attend court because your child hasn’t been attending school, you could get a fine of up to £2,500.

Authorising a leave of absence

The Headteacher is the only one who is allowed to authorise a leave of absence and only then if the following criteria are met:

you make an application to the head teacher in advance (as a parent the child normally lives with)
there are exceptional circumstances

To apply for a leave of absence, please click the link below or ask for a form from the school office.

Leave of absence request form

Exceptional circumstances are difficult to define but they are expected to be rare, significant and unavoidable and it should not be reasonably possible to schedule at a different time. Possible examples would include weddings, funerals and significant religious festivals.

It is possible for a leave of absence to be partly authorised but for some days to be unauthorised. This will be the case when an exceptional event is taking place, but the length of time being requested is longer than required to attend the event. For example, requesting a full week for a wedding taking place in this country.

Term-time Holidays

We understand the desire for families to share a holiday together and that the price difference between term-time and the school holidays is considerable, however we are unable to authorise a holiday during term-time unless there are exceptional circumstances and cost cannot be one of the considerations.

Exceptional circumstances are those in which a family can demonstrate that it is not possible for the event/activity to be reasonably rescheduled to avoid missing school. For a holiday, this is a very high bar as bookings can be made during school holidays and the DfE are clear that generally, a need or desire for a holiday or other absence for the purpose of leisure and recreation would not constitute an exceptional circumstance. This means that even in a situation in which a family are requesting a term-time holiday because they will not be able to afford a holiday in the school holiday periods, it will not count as exceptional circumstances. We cannot consider a holiday booked for dates that were mistakenly thought to be the holidays as exceptional circumstances unless we as a school have incorrectly released the wrong dates.

Parents of a child with SEND needs, may consider that a term-time holiday should be authorised with consideration for their need, for example feeling that the airport they are flying from will be too
busy for their child during the school holidays. We will consider all requests and the individual circumstances for each child but would need to be satisfied that the reason for the holiday extends beyond the desire for a leisure / recreational break. We would not usually consider the travel arrangements for a child with SEND as a reason for the child to miss out on their education.

That being said, we would encourage all parents of children with SEND to make prior contact with either the Passenger Support Service or Additional Needs Team at the relevant airports for your travel and your travel operator. These teams may be able to support in the provision of or the identification of quiet areas where families can wait until boarding and may also provide early boarding to lessen the stress of the busy boarding period.

The National Autistic Society have provided a guide for parents:
Holidays – guide for parents and carers (autism.org.uk)