1007 Attendance Term 2 2010 - 27 July 2010

Term 1 of 2010 was the best on record.  The second term, however, is never as good as the first thanks to deteriorating weather and an increase in colds and flu possibly due to the change in seasons.

While the term 2 absent rate of 14% doesn’t look good against term 1’s figure of 10%, it compares well with term 2 results from recent years

2010     14% absent                   25 pupils above 30% absent

2009     16% absent                   28 pupils above 30% absent

2008     16.4% absent                32 pupils above 30% absent

2007     13% absent                   23 pupils above 30% absent

2006     15% absent                   27 pupils above 30% absent

Despite an excellent attendance rate, we still had 25 children with less than 70% attendance compared to only 13 in term 1. 10 of these children had justifiable absences through ill health, family commitments etc.

What the data doesn’t tell you is that this is by and large a different group of children to those who were of concern in term 1. In fact only two pupils from term 1 “concerned” list reappears in term 2. It appears our strategy of contacting parents as soon as a trend begins to emerge has worked with those families. We now need a strategy to stop new names filling the gaps.

The traditional trend of children’s attendance improving as they get older continues, while there is absolutely no difference in the absence rates between girls and boys.

·         16 pupils had 100% attendance and a further 23 had only one day absent during the term.

·         96 pupils (that’s only 45%) attended at or above our target goal of 49 days.  That allows for 5 days absent for the term.

·         Our average pupil had 7 ½ days off last term.

·         On an average day in term2, we had 29 pupils absent.

There is quite a range of absence rates between classes. (from 8% to 18%) Some of this could be caused by only one or two poor attending pupils although there is only one class where there is a significant difference between the average and the median.  (A big difference indicates a couple of very high absentees)

As expected, the lower attendees are in the junior school anyway. Nonetheless we could look a little deeper to see if there are possible reasons for the differences.