Attendance and Punctuality
School Times
In the morning school starts at 8.50am and ends at 3.20pm. Please bring your child to their classroom in the morning and line up outside once the bell has rang. At the end of the day, please collect your child from this same point.
Punctual arrival at school is vitally important to ensure a calm start to the day for your child, to ensure that they don’t miss out on any learning time and to instill good practice from a young age.
The morning nursery session starts at 8.40am and ends at 11.40am. The afternoon session starts at 12.35pm and ends at 3.35pm. Please bring your child to the nursery at the start of their session and line up outside – the staff will invite you inside at the appropriate time. At the end of the session, please collect your child from this same point.
Attendance
We expect children to attend school and nursery every day and it is the responsibility of parents to ensure that children have good attendance. We class good attendance in school as being above 95% and have a whole school target of 96%. We regularly monitor the attendance of all of our children and will notify parents where we have concerns. This may involve us writing to you or inviting you in to school for a meeting.
Absence for Medical Reasons
We appreciate that all children fall ill from time to time and need to have a day or two away from school. On the first day of absence please let school know by phone call as soon as possible – you are able to leave a message on our telephone system. It is the responsibility of parents to inform school of an absence but it is our policy to follow up any unexplained absence by telephoning parents who have not contacted us by 9.30am. If you are unsure whether to send your child or not, it is always best to bring them into school – the staff here will always contact you should they feel your child is too unwell to stay. If your child starts to feel better during the day, you can bring them back to school for the afternoon session at 1.15pm.
Absence for Non-Medical Reasons
Leave of absence during term time cannot be authorised except for special circumstances (e.g. family funeral, religious observances). If you need to request leave of absence, you must speak to the head teacher about this before completing a request form – this must be completed at least two weeks in advance of the requested absence.
Although it is undoubtedly cheaper to holiday in term time, this is not a reason for absence. The curriculum is fully planned to cover all requirements throughout the year and children who are away on holiday can miss a large proportion of learning time. School cannot authorise holidays in term time and the school governors will request that the local authority take action where this occurs. This is likely to result in the issuing of a penalty notice.
A copy of our attendance policy can be downloaded below alongside a leave of absence request form: