Attendance
Attendance Strategy
At Jotmans hall we endeavour to use a variety of clear and consistent strategies to help improve school attendance. This includes monitoring and analysing attendance data to better understand patterns within our school.
Attendance awards
Attendance Awards are awarded to the classes with the top three highest attendance rate every week. During a weekly whole-school assembly, the headteacher reveals the winning classes, awarding them ‘Parliament Points’.
The initiative has proven to have had a greater impact than individual prizes, as children didn’t want to let their classmates down, and they responded well to seeing their class on the attendance chart each week.
Individual attendance for pupils is displayed on the eSchools system to enable parents to track their child’s attendance ratings.
Jotmans Hall also uses the following strategies to ensure effective school practice:
- · Having a 'first day contact' system in place, where parents are expected to inform the school of pupil absence as soon as possible
- · Monitoring attendance and looking out for patterns of poor attendance in school so issues can be tackled as early on as possible
- · Using measures such as home visits or staff picking children up from home in exceptional circumstances
- · Working with families to understand and try to tackle any barriers to attendance and punctuality.
- · Working with other agencies and individuals such as education welfare officers, social services, the police and the courts where parents do not co-operate
- · Teaching parents to understand the difference between minor ailments and illnesses that warrant a day off
- · Refusing every request for holidays unless there are really exceptional circumstances