"Education is the passport to the future, and attendance is the stamp that gets you there."
Malcolm X (1964)
Attendance
Please ring the absence line on 01709 740962 to report if your child is going to be off school.
We operate a first day response to absence. This means that our attendance officer Miss House will phone you. If there is no response, we will conduct a house visit, with another member of staff, to find out where your child is. We care about our children and need to ensure they are safe.
Good attendance shows secondary schools and future potential employers that your child is reliable.
Ferham school records details of all children’s attendance and absence from school. We do so at the beginning of morning and afternoon sessions. If your child is absent, you must inform the school immediately.
The school will record the absence and the Local Authority will receive this information for each child. The Department of Education also receives annual attendance data for the school.
Our Vision and Values
A school at the heart of its community:
Fair Enlightened Readers Honest Accepting Motivated
In order for all pupils to realise the vision that we hold for their education, they need to be in school accessing a high-quality education at all times.
Our Ferham Primary School our values Be Kind, Be Successful thread through everything we do, including pupil attendance. This supports us to build a culture that promotes the benefits of good
Belonging
Ferham Primary School is a diverse and inclusive learning community where everyone’s contribution makes a difference. We believe in providing our children with relentless positivity, love and life-choices. We strive to ensure everyone coming into our school feels welcome, happy and safe and we support families and children to have good attendance in order to foster this. We recognise that some pupils find it harder to attend school than others therefore all staff prioritise building positive relationships with all pupils and their families, proactively finding relational moments with an open heart ready to empathise, care and support. We believe that belonging starts our school in the heart of our community and that by attending well children, will epitomise our vision and values.
Ambition
Through an enjoyable, representative and ambitious curriculum, we want our children to be motivated to maximise their potential, striving to achieve expected standards in all subjects and celebrating their progress along the way. We have high expectations of our pupils particularly around attendance: they must be in school to benefit from all that we offer. Through the exceptionality of our personal development offer, we motivate children to want to come to school and to grow now and in the next phase of their education and the world of work.
Aspiration
We aim for our children to be confident communicators – in English and home languages – who believe in their own abilities enough to strive for their own successes. To achieve this, children need to be regularly in school, building on their resilience daily. We want them to attend well to become secure in the knowledge that they ‘can-do’.
Wellness
Wellness matters. We know that physical and mental wellbeing are divers in school absence. As such, our school is a calm, orderly and welcoming space and our large, safe playground offers an array of play opportunities based on Froebel’s theory of play. We use Boxall Profiles and Sensory Circuits to ensure all pupils are ready to learn, play and belong.
The Law
The law in the UK entitles every child of compulsory school age to an efficient, full-time education suitable to their age, aptitude, and any special educational need they may have.
Where parents decide to have their child registered at school, they have an additional legal duty to ensure their child attends that school regularly. This means their child must attend every day that the school is open, except in a small number of allowable circumstances such as being too ill to attend or being given permission for an absence in advance from the school.
Our School Approach
Our school approach is written in conjunction with the DFE ‘Working together to improve school attendance’. We work together with partners to ensure that we have the right culture in school to promote good attendance alongside the right support being offered at the right time to enable pupils to fully access education.
We recognise that the barriers to accessing education are wide and complex and therefore remain professionally curious at all times, seeking to expose the barriers to school attendance. We build strong relationships with our families, ensuring that they know we are a source of support at all times, that we are approachable and that we genuinely want to achieve the very best for their children.
Below explains our school strategy all of which is shared in English and home languages and via Class Dojo which reads text out for our illiterate parents and carers:
