Our commitment to students

We support our students to ensure that they all achieve the very best attendance. Poor attendance can result in restricted access to the curriculum, disaffection from school, lowered academic success and loss of educational opportunity.

Partnership with parents and carers is key

Our students are our priority, and when home and academy work together, we get the best possible student outcomes. All staff work closely with students and their families to ensure that students attend regularly and punctually, and that all understand the link between attendance and attainment.

Rewards and monitoring

Across the Trust, our academies adopt a system of rewards which acknowledges good or improved attendance and good timekeeping. Our expectation is that every student works as hard as possible to maintain 100% attendance. Each academy has a minimum attendance target of 97% – 1% above the national average for primary and over 2% for secondary.

In all our academies we:

  • regularly and promptly records attendance
  • contacts parents early when a student fails to attend without a good reason
  • closely monitors students whose attendance falls below 95%
  • put in place early interventions for those between 90-93% (i.e. those at risk of PA)

We have a unique and bespoke attendance and exclusion data dashboard. In real-time, it tracks attendance, persistent absence and exclusions.

The overall responsibility for effective attendance monitoring, strategic direction and interventions lies with the Executive Assistant Principal for personal development, behaviour and attitude (PDBA) and the PDBA Strategic Development Group.