Attendance and Behaviour

At Trumacar Nursery and Community Primary School we recognise that attending school regularly has a positive impact on learning, progress and therefore the best life chances for children.

We encourage good attendance for all pupils, by offering an environment in which pupils feel valued and part of the school community.

Department for Education (DfE) guidance states that all schools should have effective systems and procedures for encouraging regular school attendance and investigating the underlying causes of poor attendance which should be set out in an attendance policy. These systems should be reviewed regularly and modified where necessary to reflect the circumstances of the school.

Ensuring your child’s regular attendance at school is your legal responsibility and permitting absence from school without good reason creates an offence in law and may result in prosecution.

Holidays or requests for absence

Any holidays during term time must be requested via the correct form which is available from the school office. Completing this form does not automatically guarantee that any holiday will be authorised. Senior Leaders review the form and a decision is made based on each child’s current attendance; their past attendance record; and what the request for absence is for. The school reserves the right to deem any request as unauthorised and this will be placed on the child’s school record.

Illness

If your child is unwell, please contact the School Office straight away and leave us a message stating your child’s name, their class and the nature of their illness. Should their illness continue, we would ask you to let us know each day of absence. If a doctor has told you to keep them off for a prescribed time, or the school office has stated a prescribed time following the guidance for certain illnesses, then please make sure your child remains absent until they are fit and able to return to school.

To check for yourself on how long your child should be off with certain illnesses, please click here.

Lateness

If your child is going to be late for school, please contact the School Office and let us know. Any child who arrives after the school register has been closed will be marked as late and this will be reflected on their school attendance record. Should this continue then the Learning Mentor will work with families to ensure that children arrive in school on time in the future.

Persistant Absence

Persistant absence is deemed to be attendance which is below 90%. This could be as a result of regular lateness to school or actual absences from school. The Learning Mentor works hard with all families who may be approaching a 90% attendance rate to ensure that they are aware of the legal obligations for your child to be in school and on time. Should these efforts from the school not improve attendance then a meeting will be arranged for parents to explain the increasing absence rate and this may lead to a future fine and other external agencies becoming involved with the family.

Being in school every day is important for your child so please work with us to ensure that they are always in.

Behaviour

As a school we have high expectations of all of our pupils, staff, governors and the wider school community and have created a school which upholds high standards and clear values.

Parents are informed of our high expectations and are asked to read through, and agree with, our Home-School Agreement.

Our full Behaviour Policy can be found on the Policies webpage.

By having high expectations of behaviour, we aim to enable our pupils to:

Be healthy
Stay safe
Enjoy and achieve in their learning
Make a positive contribution
Achieve economic well-being
Access the full range of learning opportunities in a calm and positive environment
Achieve through appropriate expectations of work and behaviour with praise, reward and celebration and explicit and consistent consequences
Behave appropriately in a wide range of social and educational settings
Value the rights of the individual

We want:

To raise pupils’ self esteem
To promote/develop empathy and respect for self and others
To develop in pupils a sense of self discipline and an acceptance of responsibility for their own actions
To ensure regular attendance
To develop an awareness of and adherence to appropriate behaviour
To encourage pupils to value the school environment and its routines
To ensure that pupils are confident of their right to be treated fairly
To empower staff to determine and request appropriate behaviour from everyone
To acknowledge that the maintaining of good behaviour within the school is a shared responsibility
To ensure that positive behaviour is always recognised
To ensure the policy is fully understood and is consistently implemented throughout the school
To ensure effective mechanisms are in place for the monitoring and evaluation of this policy
To ensure the rights and responsibilities of all members of the school community

Within our policy we explain how we encourage and celebrate positive behaviour as well as detailing how we deal with any misbehaviour, including any steps we would take to work with parents to improve behaviour if this was needed.

Although as a school, we will work hard not to use exclusions as part of our Behaviour Management strategies, this does sometimes need to be the case. This is extremely rare at our school and we have only had one exclusion within the last 10 years.

Our belief is that by providing an enjoyable, stimulating and wide curriculum which also includes as many outdoor opportunities as possible, that children will thrive by being at our school and will want to be a part of all that is on offer and be ambassadors of the school both in school and when visiting other places.

We are very proud of the behaviour in our schools and always follow any concerns from parents up immediately, providing feedback when appropriate.