At Sprowston Community Academy we are committed to supporting the highest levels of attendance and punctuality. We believe that this will ensure that your children can be the best version of themselves.
Maintaining regular attendance is key to securing academic success; it also promotes better mental helth, physical health, social wellbeing and it helps to support a positive transition into adulthood.
Research conducted by the DFE has shown that missing just a few days of school can harm your child's ability to achieve good GCSE grades. Therefore we seek to support our families to ensure that every student can, and wants to attend school as often as they are physically able. We believe that, working with you, we have a shared duty to ensure that no child ever missed school when they could be here we week to ensure that any unavoidable absences will not unfairly impact them.
We encourage you to join us in our desire to promote and support attendance, to avoid unnecessary absences and to ensure that every student can achieve their best.
The school day begins at 8:55 am and ends at 3:25 pm.
Students can arrive on site from 8:30 am and attend one of our designated social areas. A warning bell will sound at 8:50 am to inform students that it is time to make their way to their form room ready for their 8:55 am start.
We ask any drivers who wish to drop off/ collect their children to consider road safety for their child and all others.
The area directly outside the school is a no-stopping zone; this is in place to create an area of reduced traffic flow and to ensure your children are safe. Ignoring this restriction puts our students' lives at risk.
As a parent, you must ensure that your child attends school every day that we are open. However, there may be days when your child is too ill to attend.
In this case, please report any absence before 9:00 am on the day of absence using the Arbor Parent App.
This will allow us to accurately record the reason for the absences and ascertain whether or not the child is safely in your care. This must be repeated on each day of illness for this reason.
Alternatively, you can contact the school via the absence line:
Telephone:
01603 485266
If in the morning your child initially appears to be ill, but with time appears to be OK , it is perfectly OK to send your child to school later that day, rather than keeping them at home all day. Just let us know and we can keep an eye on them for you.
If you are unsure whether or not they are too ill, our attendance team would be happy to chat and advise, alternatively, you can check out the NHS website (www.nhs.uk) for more guidance.
Please note that we make daily responsive phone calls to parents whose children are off school for illness. This allows us to discuss any additional needs your child may have, identify what we can do to support and help us to ensure a smooth transition back to school. This is a supportive measure and should not be a cause of worry.
What ‘good attendance’ will depend on your child’s individual needs and the barriers they may face. As a target, where no medical needs, disability-related or other genuine reasons exist, we expect all students to strive towards exceeding 97% attendance.
No child is born with regular attendance or with good punctuality skills! ! These are things that we learn from those around us, especially our parents, we therefore encourage you to:
At the end of the day, ensuring that your child arrives to school daily, on time and ready to learn are vital skills they will need and they form are part of your legal duty as a parent – every child has the right to a full-time education
Unfortunately, there may be an occasion, when you need a request to take your child out of school.
In these cases, leave can only be granted where there are exceptional circumstances. In order to request a period of leave, please contact the attendance team.
Please be aware that the law is very strict on this!
Taking a holiday during term time or keeping your child off for unauthorised reasons is likely to incur a fine or even criminal prosecution. If this causes you any worry, please reach out to us for help.
We like to hear from you! For general attendance issues, your child’s form tutor should be your first port of call, however, the attendance team is always on hand to offer advice, guidance and support.
| Senior Attendance Champion: Best for questions about our attendance policies | Darren Bidle |
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Attendance Officer:Deputy Attendance Officer:
Best for support for attendance concerns. |
Megan Browne Clare Randle |
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Attendance Team:
Best for general advice and guidance (e.g leave) |
Claire Bowers Victoria Rogers Jo Morton |
or |
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Year Teams:
Best for pastoral or academic support |
Head of Year Form Tutors
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Surname and initial (e.g WiseA ) |
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Pastoral Team:
Best for Behaviour & Wellbeing Support: |
Behaviour and Welfare team | Surname and initial (e.g WiseA ) |
School Contact details:
Arbor App: Allows direct contact with the attendance team
Phone: 01603 485266
Email:
We believe that reward systems, while positive for some students, can hurt those students facing barriers to attendance. In light of this, rather than reward students for attendance, we focus on providing regular opportunities for recognition and positive affirmation; In this way, we strive to promote the intrinsic value of attending school as often as possible without alienating those facing unavoidable barriers.
At the heart of our recognition system are strong student/staff relationships and the expectation that our staff will notice your child's attendance efforts, especially against the odds and regularly comment and ask students to reflect on the value of attendance.
Each month we also hold a raffle-style event with a pizza lunch for two forms groups to enjoy together. This strategy focuses on promoting a positive experience for those involved and seeks to raise the profile of attendance in a positive light, through teamship and shared positive experiences.
To promote attendance in a positive light, we also lead an Attendance Recognition System. In this strategy, the parents of all students who maintain attendance above that year's threshold are sent a letter recognising their child's attendance: Bronze for one term; silver for two terms and gold for three terms above the threshold. A platinum letter is also sent out for the students maintaining three terms at the higher aspirational threshold.
As a School, we recognise that there are many barriers to maintaining good attendance and that these can be complex and challenging. In all situations where a student is unable to attend school, we adopt a support-first approach working with the family to remove any barriers to attendance.
However, If the absence persists and there is a lack of engagement and/or success with the support offered, the school and local authority will work together to understand the nature of the absence and where required put enforced support in place. In all cases where this applies, parents will first be offered an attendance contract and issued with a notice to improve, formalising the support.
We recognise the challenges that mental helath worries can bring for our students. We, therefore, try to build trusted relationships with all of our parents/carers and families so that we can work together to prevent mental health from becoming a barrier to regular attendance for any student.
At the heart of this is our drive to provide a calm, safe, and supportive environment where all students can and want to attend as often as they can.
Where there are emerging mental helath concerns about children, we encourage all parents to make contact with us so that we can work together with them to ensure that such circumstances do not become a barrier to attendance and to mitigate any associated anxieties about attending school.
Further information can be found in the SCA Attendance Punctuality Practice Document and the BHT Attendance and Punctuality Policy. Both of these documents can be found on the policies page.
Policies Page