Attendance and absences

According to Finnish law (lukiolaki 30§), students must attend school unless they have been granted permission to be absent. Students can miss classes only if they are ill or if they have applied and been granted permission to be absent. 

If a student is absent, the teacher will make a note of this in the Wilma computer system. These absences must be explained and cleared in Wilma by the guardian (or students themselves if over 18) within a week. In order to clear the absence, the guardian must provide a short explanation for the absence. NB! When a student is sick, there is no need to specify the nature of the illness — "sick" is information enough. 

If a student has missed more than three lessons (regardless of the reason), they need to contact the subject teacher to ask if there is anything they need to do to compensate for the missed teaching. It does not mean that they will fail the course, that is the case only on very rare occasions. This way both the teacher and student can make sure the student can master the content of the course regardless of the missed lessons. Otherwise the teacher will consider the course incomplete, which  results in a lower course grade. The teachers will communicate the impact of missed lessons on course assessment at the beginning of each course. The teacher can also contact the student support team if necessary. 

The student or guardian must contact the group teacher if an illness lasts for three or more days. 

If more than 1/3 of the lessons of the course are missed without evidence supporting a valid reason, the school has the right to remove the student from the course, which results in grade K (course discontinued) in Wilma. In the IB DP Programme this means that the student needs to retake the year.  

The lessons that finish the course on Feedback day are vitally important for study success. Make sure you attend! Even if absences during these days do not automatically show up in Wilma, they will be added to total absence count and will have an effect on course assessment. Being absent without a valid reason can affect course grades. 

The group teacher can give permission to be absent for 1-3 days (when the absence is known about in advance). For a longer absence request, the request must be submitted to the acting principal Veli-Pekka Lehtinen. The head principal does not grant leaves of absence which are more than 5 school days long. We kindly ask you to take this into consideration when e.g. planning family vacations.  Note that it is the students’ responsibility to contact the subject teachers beforehand to agree on possible extra tasks.  

All requests must be made beforehand and via Wilma. 

Instructions on how to apply for an absence in Wilma: 

1. Open Wilma. 

2. Go to "Applications and decisions" tab in the blue bar on top of the page. 

3. Click "New application" on the right side of the page.  

4. Fill in and send the form "Exemption from schoolwork".