Governor Monitoring – Thursday 2nd May, 2019 Focus: Attendance It was a pleasure to meet with Mandy Thorpe, the school PFSA. Mandy works across seven schools and is with St Benedict’s every Thursday for 5 hours. Mandy demonstrated how attendance is monitored from the classroom through to her monitoring attendance, and the measures in place to improve attendance. On the day, the whole school attendance stood at 93.69% with a breakdown of individual class attendance below: Unicorn Cat Owl Chameleon Spider Tortoise Leopard Peacock
93.49% 95.59% 95.22% 90.6% 93.02% 94.05% 93.15% 94.81%
Attendance is monitored daily by the office, who follow up on any N Codes. These are where a teacher has marked the register N not knowing a reason for absence. The office call home as a safeguarding duty to ensure the child is safe and to request a reason for the absence. The register is then updated. Attendance is checked weekly by printing reports, and is cross referenced with the previous week identifying any persistent attendance issues. Letters are sent home when a student’s attendance falls below 95%. Currently there are more than 30 children classed as ‘persistent’ with absence under 90%, 15 of which don’t have good reasons for absence. Unfortunately it appears that although continued effort is made to increase the attendance for these 15 children, it is unlikely that we will see a significant change. Letters are sent home, and parental engagement is reasonable with some parents discussing attendance with Mandy. Others may not, however their child’s attendance does improve, showing the positive impact of the initial letter home. Failing an improvement with an individual child’s attendance, Mandy follows a structured procedure with parents to include meetings, and a warning penalty notice along with the help of the local area Attendance Officer. We discussed the number of unauthorised sessions which prompts a fine, historically this was 10 sessions (each registration being one session), however there was some uncertainty whether this has increased to 30. Upon following up, I believe this is 30 sessions. There are 8 children who have particularly low attendance and 4 children are classed as travellers with attendance impacting the whole school percentage. We discussed a control group where a
whole school and class attendance can be reported without this controlled group. Mr Ranger does report this at Governor meetings and the percentage does increase considerably. We discussed areas for possible development with some questions below:
Encouraging good attendance – We discussed in depth improving bad attendance but could more be done to encourage the good attendees. The 100% term attendance rewards are great, but is this discouraging to those children who have a single day lost to sickness?
Attendance incentives – Are attendance rewards given weekly, suggestion by Mandy a weekly raffle? Does this exclude the control group for any class incentives?
(Mr Ranger did touch on the points above during a Governors meeting on the 2nd May, 2019).
Teacher involvement – How involved are the teachers with attendance other than the registers? Do they follow up any absences through conversations with the children to feed back to Mandy?
Reporting to parents – Reports are sent home twice each year, but could this be each term with a letter reiterating the importance of attendance?
Summary On a whole I was very impressed with the amount of work Mandy covers in 5 hours per week. St Benedict’s attendance figures are fairly good, particularly when this includes children who take time for a number of local cultural events. The structure of attendance reporting is thorough, detailed and consistent. Improving low attendance is continuously discussed and being monitored, whilst encouraging good attendance and rewarding children.