Attendance
At Birchwood Community High School, we recognise and understand the importance of attendance and punctuality in enabling students to get the most of their experience with us.
Being in school and having the best attendance possible underpins all the many benefits of school for your child, such as their learning, personal health and wellbeing and wider development including building friendships and taking part in enrichment opportunities.
Attendance matters. Are you in? #TeamBirchwood
Our Standards and Expectations for Attendance
We expect all our learners to aim for 100% attendance.
But we also know that for some children, attending school every day can be harder for them than for others.
We always work in partnership with our families to solve problems and support every child’s attendance.
What we expect from families
As a parent, you are legally responsible for making sure your child gets a suitable fulltime education.
To help your child attend as much school as possible, you can:
- Promote positive and healthy attendance patterns with your child and set good bedtime and morning routines.
- Ensure your child arrives at school every day, on time and equipped and ready to learn.
- Ensure we have at least three up-to-date addresses and telephone numbers so we can contact you quickly when required.
- Report absence via Class Charts before 8:30am each day until your child returns to school.
- Ensure medical appointments are made outside of school time.
- Avoid making holiday requests during term time.
- Contact school if you are experiencing difficulty getting your child to attend school.
- Work with the school and any other agencies of support to resolve any difficulties which may affect regular school attendance.
What you can expect from us
Celebration of excellent student attendance and punctuality on a weekly and termly basis in assemblies and on social media with a variety of rewards and recognition, including retail vouchers and school trips.
An onsite Attendance Team dedicated to working with students, families and staff to improve attendance each and every day.
Our Polaris team will carry out pastoral work with students in raising their attainment and achieving their full potential.
Did you know?
There are 175 non-school days in the year.
That’s 175 days to spend on visits, holidays, shopping, and other appointments.
SCHOOL IS TOO IMPORTANT TO YOUR LIFE CHANCES TO TO MISS.
Punctuality
Being late to school or lessons doesn’t only affect your child, it disrupts other children in the class as well as the teachers trying to teach a lesson.
If you do think you are going to be late to school, please do not keep your child off for the rest of the day. Being late and in school is better than being absent and missing out. If your child is late for a genuine, unavoidable reason please phone the school office.
The start of a lesson is when important recall activities take place to ensure learning gaps are filled. Students who are late throughout the day will make up their lost time over lunch and after school.
The Law
If a student arrives late to school but whilst the register is still open, they are marked as late (L on the attendance register). We believe that teaching students the vital skill of reliability is important for them to achieve their full potential in school, but also to support them for the wider world where punctuality is very important for employers and further education settings.
If a pupil arrives at school after the register has closed, without a satisfactory reason, this may be classed as an unauthorised absence (O code on the attendance register) and may lead to prosecution for not ensuring your child has regular school attendance.
