Dear Parents/Carers,
As you will be aware, we maintain unapologetically high expectations and this includes your child’s attendance.
Attending the academy every day is crucial to your child’s success in class assessments, but more importantly to prepare them for their year 11 and 13 final exams. The Department for Education suggests that if attendance falls below 96%, attainment is negatively affected. Even for high-achieving students poor attendance has a significant negative impact on their grades. It has been shown that missing just 17 days of school a year reduces final GCSE grades by one grade across all subjects. This could easily prevent your child from getting an apprenticeship or into the university or career of their choice.
The average Leigh Academy Strood attendance for a year 9 student is currently 89.7%. The most notable reason for absence in the past 3-4 weeks is illness. Whilst we completely sympathise and understand that some students have chronic illnesses or accidents/operations that require time spent in hospital, if your child has a cough, cold, sore throat, headache etc please send them into the academy. We can support these minor illnesses by having medication in the college bases and allowing them to take them at break and lunch times. We also have the ‘On Call’ system where students can request the ‘On Call’ pastoral staff member to come to their lesson and support them if they feel unwell. We support our students to be resilient young people and come to school even with these minor illnesses and attempt their studies in the academy. I ask for your support in this also.
In addition to this, we have introduced a reward throughout module 1 for year 9 students only. Each form tutor is going to do a random generator raffle every Friday including names of every student who has achieved 100% that week. The winning student per form is going to win a share bag of Haribo sweets, a week long privilege card for themselves and also for a friend. A privilege card gives students the access to enter and exit the academy using the front door and also queue jump in the restaurant! We sought feedback from students in module 6 regarding our attendance rewards and students explained that they prefer smaller rewards where more students can win; we are implementing that into our rewards strategy for this academic year and look forward to hearing student’s continued feedback!
You can access your child’s up to date attendance figure on MCAS. Please discuss your child’s current attendance figure with them regularly and agree how you can work together to ensure that this figure is as high as possible.
If you have any queries about attendance figures, illness, penalty notices, medical evidence etc then please refer to our policy on the academy website. Please also email attendance@strood.latrust.org.uk for any further queries.
Yours faithfully,
Mrs G West
Assistant Principal- Attendance
