Sarah Cox, headteacher of Willows Main Academy in Grimsby (a part of DELTA Academies Belief) tells us in regards to the many profitable initiatives they use to sort out attendance challenges at college, and the way her faculty has been chosen to steer a DfE attendance hub on account of their onerous work.
Attendance hub
We’re so happy to have been recognised for our onerous work on attendance as a college, and therefore chosen to steer a DfE attendance hub. The attendance hub permits colleges with robust attendance observe to share their approaches with senior leaders in different comparable colleges to assist them to enhance. Hubs additionally facilitate an ongoing skilled dialogue about attendance amongst faculty leaders on a peer assist foundation.
I’m additionally blissful to have the chance to share our prime attendance ideas with different colleges throughout the nation right here, on this weblog.
Breakfast
On this new tutorial yr, we’re taking a variety of actions to make sure that we have now as many pupils coming into faculty as potential. To kick off, we’re providing free breakfast to all our pupils within the first week of time period. We wish pupils to be able to study and never feeling hungry, however we additionally wish to present our dedication to their well-being and attendance from day one.
Attendance playing cards
One thing we’ll proceed to do, following on from the earlier tutorial yr, is giving all pupils attendance playing cards within the first week. They get a stamp of their card for each morning and afternoon session that they’re at school. In addition they get additional stamps for punctuality. On the finish of the week, pupils get a variety of entries into prize draw relying on what number of stamps they’ve obtained of their card. We discover this to be a really motivating incentive for the pupils – they actually stay up for a prize draw on the finish of the week!
A heat welcome
We may also proceed to make an enormous effort to ensure that all workers are on the college gate to greet pupils and fogeys within the mornings. We actually wish to ensure that our faculty is a warming and welcoming atmosphere, to ensure that households should not anxious about coming in.
House visits
Earlier than the summer season holidays, we checked out pupils who had not been coming to high school as recurrently. This made it simpler to observe attendance within the first week of time period. If the identical pupils didn’t are available, , we made it a precedence to name dad and mom and make dwelling visits to ensure that they’re okay. Employees that conduct dwelling visits are rigorously chosen to construct relationships with kids and households to advertise robust relationships and, in flip, good attendance.
Attendance calendar
Final yr we additionally pulled collectively a full yr attendance calendar, to map out our key attendance actions for academics, pupils and fogeys. This calendar contains our attendance assemblies, dad and mom evenings, workshops for households, and the dates within the faculty yr the place, as a crew, we’ll have a look at our information to see how we’re doing. We discovered this very useful and we can be producing a calendar for this tutorial yr.
Faculty tradition
Finally, we have now tried to create a heat, welcoming and inclusive faculty the place dad and mom and pupils really feel valued, and the place they wish to attend. Growing a supportive faculty tradition with excessive expectations for attendance has been key.
If you wish to discover out extra about what we do, we have now developed a set of attendance sources for our hub which you could find on our web site: Attendance Hub – Willows Academy
