Absences and attendance
Absences and attendance
If your child will be absent from school parents will need to acknowledge their child’s absences online, as well as to notify the college in advance of any absences.
All student absences need to be acknowledged by parents via Parent Lounge. Where the College hasn’t been pre-notified through Parent Lounge of a child’s absence, the system will generate a notification within Parent Lounge asking for the absence to be acknowledged; this is usually within 10 -15 minutes of the roll being marked. Rolls are marked twice daily, morning and afternoon. If by 11 am, a child’s absence has still not been acknowledged, a subsequent notification will be issued via SMS asking parents to log in to Parent Lounge and acknowledge.
Absence Notifications
As part of the changes parents can now notify the College via Parent Lounge of their child’s absence, either on the day, or for a future date during the current term. Absence notifications can be made at any time, including after hours and on weekends and ideally should be done as soon as possible before the child is due at school.
When notifying the College parents will be asked to advise the type of absence
- Absent From School (where the child will be away for the whole day)
- Late for School (where the child will be at school but is arriving late) or
- Early Departure (where the child will be at school at the usual time but needs to leave early)
Parent will also need to select the reason for their child’s absence and are able to attach supporting documentation eg doctor’s certificates if required.
For compliance purposes all notifications are reviewed by staff before being processed into the attendance system and similar to our current manual system, parents may be contacted if staff have any questions or if more information is needed.
Below please find links to guides on how to use the attendance portal on parent lounge. There is one for accessing on a computer and one for accessing via mobile phones as the screens are slightly different.
Add attendance record on computer
Add attendance record on mobile phone
If your child is arriving late to school then they will need to register at the sign-in kiosk in the Secondary Office.
Students are expected to have a minimum attendance rate of 90% across the school year. This means that being absent for more than 18 days in one school year would fall short of this attendance rate.
Participation in a school organised event, such as Ulpan, school camps or optional trips is not considered to be an absence from school. This means that any other absences including participation in external programs or family holidays during school term, along with ad hoc sick days all count as days absent. Where possible, the College discourages parents from organising family holidays during school term.
Teachers are not required or expected to offer catch-up lessons to students who are absent from school for parent excused absences, such as family holidays. The responsibility lies with the student to catch up on the content they have missed.
In the case of an extended illness, parents should contact the Head of Year as early as possible to discuss a study schedule where appropriate. Teachers will try to assist students who have missed classes through illness.
In the case of students taking VCE subjects (Unit 1 & 2 and Unit 3 & 4), VCAA has a minimum requirement of 90% attendance in each subject, therefore students who miss out lessons in one subject to study for another risk jeopardising their VCE studies.
Students who miss classes may be penalised with a detention to make up their attendance rate.