Trust Attendance Initiatives

Year Six Attendance League 2020

Our Trust Y6 attendance league starts on Monday 24th February and runs for 12 weeks (excluding holidays). Its great that every single Y6 class within the Trust is taking part this year. The league will run on very similar lines to last year, but hopefully its a new, improved version!

Each week classes will 'play' each other and the class with the highest overall attendance wins for the week. Three points will be awarded for a win, 2 points for a draw (counts as a draw if they are very close) and 1 point for a loss. The good news is that this can now be calculated without requiring input from each academy every week.

Some classes have a 'joker' card to play for one week. This is partly because there is an odd number of classes taking part this year and also to mitigate for classes where there are specific attendance issues or the academy is in an area of high deprivation. If your class has the 'joker' for one week then they will automatically get a win. Should you feel that a class has a particular difficulty to be taken into account on any specific week then please contact Wendy to let her know and additional points may be awarded.

Please do actively use the Y6 attendance league to spur your children and parents into action and enter into the competitive spirit, as children generally will rise to the challenge. Weekly updates will be sent out as we work through the league and the latest results/matches will be posted on this page. You can also access a copy of the 'master spreadsheet' showing all matches, dates etc from the folder below.

Finally, just to remind you that the prize is the equivalent of £10 per Y6 child to spend on a celebration of your choice.

September Attendance Awareness Month

This initiative was based on research from the USA that demonstrates that pupils who have good attendance during the first month of school tend to continue with good attendance all academic year. This is particularly important in the first month of the first year of school, hence the academy focus on EYFS, although resources are available for all year groups. The resources used have been adapted from the USA Attendance Works Website with their full permission. See folder below to access the resources which include parental information sheets for each key stage, graphics and suggested Tweets to use. These are available as editable Word documents if you wish to customise or as PDFs.

Attendance in the reception year across all primary academies will be monitored for the month of September and you will be able to find a weekly update here. The academy with the most improved attendance compared to last year will win a prize of £150 to fund any resource that they wish for their reception class. Second prize is £100 and third prize is £50. Where there are less than 20 in the year group, the smaller academies will be grouped together and, if they should win, will receive the prize to be split between them.

House Attendance Competition

This competition will take place between Monday 18th November 2019 and Friday 14th February 2020. Each academy has four houses who will be in competition with each other for the best attendance. It is up to individual academies how exactly they wish to run this but a suggestion is that attendance by house for each week is displayed prominently in a corridor and also announced in assembly. Bromcom will allow you to easily review attendance by house as a subset of the attendance percentage report, but if you have any difficulties with this then please make contact for assistance. All participating primary academies will be given a cup to present to the winning house on the Friday before February half term.

How the House Attendance Initiative will work at Eastfield:

• Launch at whole school assembly (18.11.19)

• Weekly reveal at each Monday assembly regarding which of our four houses has the highest weekly attendance - the winning house will be awarded the attendance trophy, plus an attendance rosette to be displayed on the house board display for the week. House points will also be awarded to the winning house each week.

• At the end of the initiative (Feb), the house which cumulatively has the highest attendance over the period will be awarded the prize of afternoon tea.

Quay Academy are already ahead of the game on using house competitiveness to drive improvement in attendance so please contact their acting principal, Caroline Broadhead, if you would like any further tips. You can also find out some of the things they are doing at Quay by watching the video below: