It’s important that children attend school regularly and on time. At Brotherton and Byram Community Primary Academy, we recognise that excellent attendance leads to excellent achievement.
To promote whole school attendance, every week the classes who achieve above the government’s national average for primary school attendance are celebrated in assembly. We are aiming for every child to achieve at least 97% attendance this year. We use a Classopoly board for classes to gain rewards for their excellent attendance based on a monopoly board theme. The children love this!
We are aware that we couldn’t improve our attendance figures without your support, and we very much appreciate parents who promote these good habits of punctuality and attendance. It is recognised where children miss chunks of learning or don’t have a calm prompt start to the day it significantly impacts on their ability to learn and make progress. Also by getting children into these good routines around attendance it stays with them as they go through the education system and onward into adult life. It is important to us that we work in partnership with you to ensure your children are in school every day and on time.
Where families are struggling with this we are always here to support and advise where we can. Please come and speak to us if you are having difficulties getting your child into school.
Pupil Absences
As a parent, having a child who is ill can be a very stressful time, whether caring for them, looking after other siblings, trying to contact the doctor or making arrangements with work.
Therefore please help us to help you, by reporting your child’s absence to school no later than 9.15am. Our answer machine is on 24 hours a day, so please leave a message if you ring school and there is no one available to answer your call. Alternatively you can email us on admin.bbs@ebor.academy
Unfortunately if your child is absent and we do not hear from you, we have a duty of care to call each of your emergency contacts until we are able to establish that your child is safe and the cause for their absence. In the event that we are unable to do this we will then send a text message to the primary contact for your child.
If by 10am we still haven’t been able to speak to a parent/carer, we are then legally obliged to carry out a home visit. This is obviously an added pressure on parents and places a strain on staffing within the school, all of which could be easily avoided by simply notifying us by one of the methods above that your child will be absent that day.
If your child is off for more than one day, please make sure that you let us know each morning that they won’t be in school again to avoid us having to call you to find out how they are.
Thank you for your support and cooperation in keeping our pupils safe.
Useful Link: Should my child go to school/nursery today?
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