Celebrating Excellent Attendance and Punctuality
A massive welcome back! I hope you’ve all had a lovely summer break with your children. It was lovely to see the children back, going into to their new classes and looking smart in their uniforms.
Over the summer holidays, I have been busy with setting up new measures to celebrate and promote children’s attendance and improve punctuality.
The reason for this is that, for our children to gain the greatest benefit from their education it is important that they are in school, on time, every day that school is open, unless the reason for the absence is unavoidable.
We believe that regular attendance is of the greatest importance so that children:
- Have full access to the curriculum and are more likely to achieve well and leave school with the vital skills and knowledge they need for their future lives.
- Are able to build positive relationships and develop social skills which prepare them for the next phase in their education.
- Are able to develop their self-esteem, their sense of worth and sense of belonging.
- Are able to develop a positive attitude to school and the world of work, understanding how important it is to be punctual and reliable.
Therefore, in accordance with the UK Government’s expectation that good attendance is regarded as 96% or above, we will be monitoring attendance closely and communicating regularly with families with poor attendance. However, we do understand that some absences cannot be helped for a number of personal reasons and always take this into consideration when looking at your child’s attendance level.
Most importantly though, we want to focus heavily on pupils with good or improved attendance. As a result, I’ve reviewed and updated the School’s Attendance & Punctuality Policy to help us keep up to date with the latest laws and regulations, as well as being more consistent with the school’s best practices, which is important in keeping our children safe.
We now have many initiatives to support and celebrate attendance and punctuality to ensure it remains a high profile in school with our staff, children and their families.
I want to share with the ways in which we are going to celebrate excellent attendance and punctuality at our school, as well as how we plan to improve attendance and punctuality too, so as soon as the School’s Governors have authorised the Policy, we will be uploading it to our School’s website.
We will have weekly, half termly rewards and a “Grand Prize Draw” at the end of the year for children achieving 96% and above attendance and who have been punctual throughout the year, so watch this space for further details.
Starting from today, we have also kicked off with our ‘Perfect Punctuality Pizza Party’ challenge, which involves getting all the children in school on time.
We are hoping that the much more positive approach to our new systems discourages any rewards which single out any pupils for low attendance.
The reason being is that at a primary stage, pupils’ attendance is parent lead and therefore want to encourage pupils to develop healthy attendance habits and want to come to school every day.
We want all children to understand the value of good attendance and to strive to have this through developing or maintaining healthy attendance habits which when learnt young will stand them in good stead for the rest of their school career and working life.
Thank you for your continued support with improving attendance and punctuality.