Attendance
Attendance matters for your child’s life chances.
We want our children to be in school 100% of the time so that they achieve their Great Life. Even with a short period of illness, children can still achieve the National target of 97%. Our school attendance is currently below this. If you look at your child’s last report you will see what their attendance, and punctuality, is so far this year.
Registration is taken at 8.30a.m when school starts. Any child arriving after this time will be marked late and after 8.45a.m. deemed to be legally absent and will NOT receive an attendance mark for the morning. The register is also taken at the start of the afternoon session.
When your child misses school, they miss new learning. When they return to school, they will have to try to catch up on the learning they have lost, whilst also learning the new things for that day or week. If they do not catch up with everyone else in class, they can feel upset, less confident, less happy in school and do not achieve as well as they could.
Not only is school a place for new learning, it is a place to learn to share, take turns, get on with others, make close friends. Missing school can mean your child feels left out and unhappy: it can lead to poor behaviour and school avoidance as they do not feel part of the community. Even the youngest children need good attendance to make sure they do not miss out on developing friendships and social skills.
The more time your child misses from school, the less likely they are to achieve well in our school, in their GCSEs or A Levels and so the poorer their chances of being in education, employment or training when they finally leave school. Three quarters of children who have over 97% attendance achieve 5 or more GCSEs at grades 5+. Lower attendance results in lower and fewer qualifications.
If you are struggling to get your child to come to school, please come and talk to us to see what we can do to help as poor attendance now will only get worse as your child gets older. We have breakfast club, a walking bus and do whatever we can to help.
We, like you, want them to be great learners and great people so they have a great life.
Our Attendance Policy
We want every child at Beckfoot Heaton to have a great life. We work together for a better future for our children.
It is easier to start a child’s educational life with good attendance, than to try to improve it later.
Please click here to see the Trust Attendance Policy
https://www.beckfoottrust.org/about-us/key-information/policies-and-documents/
Our school Attendance protocol is here
Attendance and Punctuality Protocol
How do we expect our staff to help make sure attendance is good?
This checklist exemplifies a set of approaches that will lead to good attendance if they are followed.
