Trust Attendance Initiatives

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. 

In addition to the above, the Children's Commissioner released a report in July 2022 which you can access from here.  This report is well worth a read as it talks about some stark research that shows that children who missed the second third and fourth day of a new term are predicted an overall absence of almost 45% and children who miss mid-week days (Tues-Thu) are more likely to be habitually absent.   It also discussed why full attendance in the first week of term is crucial and that schools should be on to any absence, even from the first day of term.  There are also no surprises in the analysis of attendance/absence across the school year as it mirrors our own attendance patterns across primary within DRET.

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.

Remember, that to be really successful, you should be sending messages about having great attendance in the autumn term out to parents now and ensure that a leaflet is enclosed with information packs for new pupils and their parents.

House Attendance Competition

This competition will take place between Monday 20th November 2023 and Friday 26th January 2024.  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.  More information to follow during early November 2022.

Year Six Attendance League 2024

Our Trust Y6 attendance league starts in the summer term.  We hope that every single Y6 class within the Trust will take part.  The league will run on very similar lines to previous years as explained below.

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.