Southfield Park Primary School

Attendance and Punctuality

Good school attendance is central to success for children, helping them develop academic and social skills for life. We seek to understand and remove any barrier to good school attendance by working collaboratively with families. 

‘Absences - authorised as well as unauthorised can add up to academic trouble’

There is much research to prove the link between attendance and achievement and therefore it is very important that your child attends school every day unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Illness
It can be tricky deciding whether or not to keep your child off school when they're unwell. There will be times when it is obvious that your child is simply too unwell to come to school, such as sickness or diarrhoea.

Please refer to the government guidelines on whether your child is too ill for school: Is my child too ill for school?

Please be assured that your child’s health and well-being is of the utmost importance to us. If we feel a child should not be in school because they’re too unwell we will contact you with a view to sending them home.

Please click here to see our latest Attendance Policy, and click here to download the Grant for Leave of Absence for Exceptional Circumstances.

Every child is expected to achieve 100% attendance. 

​​​​​Southfield Park Primary School is dedicated to promoting full attendance and understanding and supporting the root causes of absence. We aim to remove barriers to attendance by working collaboratively with families and local partners. To enable us to do this we:  

• Expect high levels of attendance from all children and create a culture where children want to attend school every day  
• Monitor attendance closely and analyse data to identify partners  
• Listen to parents/carers and children to seek to understand barriers to attendance and agree next steps to enable improvement  
• Support full attendance by removing barriers in school and help families access any support that they may need  
• Formalise support when absence persists and voluntary support is not working or being engaged with 
• Enforce attendance through statutory interventions when all other avenues have been exhausted   

School Day Timings  

Punctuality is very important and sets important lifelong habits.   

The table below sets out the expectations for all children at Southfield Park Primary School for all year groups

 
All registers will be considered ‘closed’ at 9:15am.  Any children arriving after this time and who do not have a good reason for doing so are marked as having an unauthorised absence for that session.