Attendance

Research by the Department for Education demonstrates that there is a direct link between a student's attendance and their academic achievement.

A 95% attendance rate means that your child has been absent for 10 days, or 50 lessons. If you take your child out of school every year for a week’s holiday, by the end of their secondary school life they will have missed 70 days of school, or the equivalent of more than three months of teaching. It will be even more if they have had days off for illness as well.  That is a significant amount of work to catch up on and children are usually not very good at collecting the work they missed and writing up the notes, which means they then fall behind the other students and make less progress.

Unless your child is really ill, you should send them into school.  Mild issues, such as slight headaches and nausea will often improve once the student has arrived at school, and they are getting on with their school day. Please be assured that should your child start to feel unwell at school, we will contact you if they are too ill to be in school, and we will look after them until you are able to collect them. We also have qualified first-aiders in school who can help in an emergency.

We endeavour to work with families in a variety of ways using our Pastoral Team, Educational Welfare Officer and East Sussex, Behaviour and Attendance Support (ESBAS) service to make sure that any problems or circumstances which may lead or be leading to poor attendance are given the right attention and appropriate support.

If you want to request absence from school for your child, please download the document below and return the completed form to reception, marked for the attention of the Headteacher.  Please be aware that holidays in term time will only be authorised if there are exceptional circumstances.