Attendance
Attendance Expectations
The National Average attendance figure is 93%. Please help us support your child's education by ensuring that they are in school every day and on time.
Our colleagues in the Education Welfare Service come into school regularly to check our registers and will write to families where attendance is an ongoing concern. If your child is not going to be in school because they are unwell or for exceptional circumstances, you must let us know so that we can record this.
Children whose attendance drops below 93% are monitored in school. Anyone who drops below 90.1% is monitored by both the school and Education Welfare and are classed as ‘persistent absentees’.
Absence Procedures
If your child is unwell, please contact the office on each day of absence to let us know what is wrong, how they are doing and when you might expect them to be back in school.
Please try to ensure that medical appointments are made outside of school hours. Where this is not possible, please provide us with evidence of your appointment so that we can authorise this as medical leave.
If there are regular patterns of the same illness we may offer a referral to the School Nurse to support you.
If there are regular patterns of absence or attendance becomes a concern we may require medical evidence and may not authorise absences.
Holidays
Holidays should be taken during school holidays, please refer to the annual holiday dates that are available in the office, on this website and here. Holidays taken during term time will not usually be authorised. If you and your child do need to travel during term time, you must inform school in good time using the forms available at the office. It is at the Headteachers discretion whether to mark the request for leave as authorised. Holidays taken during term may result in a referral to Education Welfare and a fine.
Covid
Whilst covid restrictions are in place, there are some additional requirements around attendance. We ask that if your child or ANY household member is displaying Covid symptoms, that you self-isolate as a household until you receive a negative test result. If children attend school with a persistent cough or temperature we will isolate them within school and ask you to collect them and take them for a test.
If a family member receives a positive test result, children can attend school. However, we request that you take them for a PCR test before bringing them in. Please send results to safeguarding@stanford.merton.sch.uk
Remember if a family member has a positive result they must isolate and another family member will need to bring your child to school. If adults in the household are unvaccinated they will also need to isolate for 10 days.
Stan
We are very lucky to have a special member of the Stanford Team - Stan Bear. It is Stan's special job to make sure that we work hard to reach our whole school attendance goal of 96% or more. Stan loves great attendance so much that he visits the class with the highest attendance each week and keeps a diary of his adventures which he shares in our School Newsletters.