Attendance Update September 2024
Parent and carer responsibilities.
Your legal responsibility as a parent or carer is to ensure that your child or children of school age receive a suitable full-time education. Once enrolled in school, it remains the parent or carer's legal responsibility to ensure that their child attends school regularly and arrives on time each day.
New Attendance Rules Our Parents Need to Know from September 2024
If a child misses just one day of school, that is one day’s worth of education lost. If it’s more than one day, those losses will be cumulative and the effect on long-term prospects could not be more damaging.
Prior to Covid, absenteeism had been on the decline, but since the lockdowns, it appears attitudes towards attendance have changed and we are now seeing a steep increase in absenteeism once again - around 380,000 fewer pupils were persistently off school last year than the year before. This does not take into account the number of children not attending school due to SEND/SEMH.
The DFE have published guidance on managing school attendance which became mandatory from September 2024.
Here's what you need to know as a parent.
£80 fines and Improvement Notices
Absence fines charged to parents are £80, or £160 if not paid within 21 days. From Autumn term 2024, only two fines can be issued to the same parent for the same child within a three-year rolling period.
Any notice thereafter is automatically charged at £160.
Parents will also receive "improvement notices", where they are are informed that this is their last opportunity to engage with education and improve their child's attendance before a fine is issued.
National fine thresholds
Schools have to consider a fine if a pupil misses 10 sessions of unauthorised absence in a rolling period of 10 school weeks. One school session is half a day, a full day is therefore two sessions.
Schools do not have a blanket position of issuing or not issuing penalty notices.
The threshold can be met with “any combination of unauthorised absence.
For example, four sessions in term time plus six instances of arriving late.
Long-Term Sickness will be Flagged with the Local Authority Derbyshire County Council
Schools have to give councils the name and address of sick pupils who they believe will miss 15 consecutive or cumulative days. Schools also have a duty of care to inform a pupil’s social worker if there are unexplained absences from school.
Mental Health Awareness
As a school, we are particularly mindful of pupils absent from school due to mental or physical ill health or their special educational needs and/or disabilities and provide them with additional support.
The guidance acknowledges, “many children will experience normal but difficult emotions that make them nervous about attending school, such as worries about friendships, schoolwork, examinations or variable moods”. But it is “important to note that these pupils are still expected to attend school regularly”.
Working together to improve school attendance - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)