Attendance
A child’s attendance is crucial to many things at school, and it affects progress, achievement, behaviour and social skills. We reward good and improved attendance through year group assemblies, house assemblies and house points. Competitions run school wide for highest attendance as a form group and year competitions run focusing on attendance also.
A child who has an attendance of under 90% is considered to be persistently absent from school and we will work with young people and their families to help improve this by overcoming any barriers that may be affecting school attendance.
If your child is absent from school and you do not inform the school of a reason, please expect an email or a phone call to ask for a reason as to why your child is not in school. Absence must be reported each day the child is off, even for known long term absence. As a school, we will attempt to make contact with you daily, if you do not contact us we may use other contact numbers you have given us as well, so please ensure these are up to date. Our school attendance officer will make the first contact with you if you do not report your child’s absence. Form tutors may contact home to discuss your child’s absence and to see if there is anything we can do to support the young person. If a child is particularly vulnerable, we may do a home visit if absence continues to ensure the young person is safe.
If unauthorised absence continues, after 10 days we will inform the Local Authority.
Reporting absence
On each day of absence, parents or carers should provide the student’s name, tutor group and reason for absence before 8.45am by either:-
Telephoning the school office on 01727 853047, reporting their absence on Edulink or emailing: attendance@townsend.herts.sch.uk
Absence for appointments during the course of the day
If a student needs to be absent during the school day for appointments that cannot be arranged outside of school hours, the following procedure should be followed:
The school office is informed in advance by email or telephone and evidence of appointments should be provided.
The student must sign out before leaving the school premises and sign in on their return, so the school has a record of them being off site in case of a fire evacuation or other emergency.
Students feeling ill during the course of the day
If a student feels ill during the school day, they must go to the school office to be assessed. If the office staff feel it is appropriate for a student to go home, they will ask for the student’s Director of Learning to authorise this and then the school office will phone you and discuss it. Students should not contact parents directly or leave the school without following this procedure.
Late to school procedure
If a pupil is late once in a week, this will be recorded on Arbor but no sanction will be issued.
If a pupil is late on more than one occasion per week, they will be issued a centralised 30-minute senior leadership lunchtime detention for each time they are late.
Detentions will be recorded and monitored by the attendance improvement officer, who will inform the form tutor of the child.
If parents/ carers provide a reason that the school deems acceptable for the lateness, it will be recorded as a late, but no sanction will be issued.
Requesting leave of absence for an exceptional reason
For any request for special leave of absence during term-time, please complete the attached form below and return it via email to attendance@townsend.herts.sch.uk.
