Supporting you and your child

At Lemington Riverside, we want to work with you and your child to make their attendance as excellent as we can. 
 
We know that when a child's attendance dips, there is always a reason for this. From an early stage we will let you know if we notice your child's attendance is starting to cause a concern. These are the steps we will take to work with you to improve your child's attendance:
 
1. Attendance Check-In: We'll invite you to either meet with us in person or over the phone for an 'attendance check in'. At our check in we will have a chat about any reasons why your child's attendance might have dipped and how we can work together to get it back to where it needs to be. We can work with you in many different ways to overcome many challenges, and if we can't support you, we can help you find the support you need. At our attendance meeting, we'll agree what you will do as parents and what we'll do as a school to help support change. We will type these up into an agreement called a 'Parent Contract' - this is an agreement between the school and parents on the actions we will all take. 
 
2. Work-in-Partnership: Following the attendance check-in, the school and the parents will be expected to work on all of the agreed points. We will then agree a date to have a check-in to look at your child's attendance following the agreed support - usually at this point we notice an improvement and we will only check-in again if we need to discuss further support or if concerns about your child's attendance return. 
 
If concerns continue:
 
3. Internal Monitoring: If we still have concerns about your child's attendance, we will inform you that we need to internally monitor your child's attendance for 30 days. This means that we will keep a close eye on your child's attendance every day for 30 days - we will not be able to authorise any absences unless we have medical evidence (e.g. a medical appointment letter, note from a GP or prescription). After 30 days if there have been no further unauthorised absences, we will let you know that the 30 day internal monitoring is passed and will check-in to see if we can offer any further support working together. 
 
4. Referral to the Local Authority for legal monitoring: During the internal monitoring 30 days, if there are further unauthorised absences, we have to refer your child's attendance concerns to the Local Authority. This may result in legal monitoring which can ultimately lead to fines or prosecution. We really don't want to reach this stage and want to work with you to overcome any barriers or issues before this point.