Attendance of children looked after at their school
Schools are required to take attendance registers twice a day. Schools are required to record whether pupils are present; attending an approved educational activity; absent or unable to attend due to exceptional circumstances.
Where a pupil of compulsory school age is absent, schools have a responsibility to ascertain the reason and ensure the proper safeguarding action is taken.
The Virtual School monitors the attendance of children looked after on a daily basis and reports on their attendance regardless on when they entered care. All schools and education providers are contacted daily and asked to report the attendance of children looked after.
December 2020 performance
The March 2020 data onwards includes the last
week of March (week beginning 23rd) where schools closed due to the national
lockdown and we were not collecting data.
From September 2020, West Sussex brought the collection of attendance data for our Children Looked After Pupils in-house.
Overall attendance has remained around the 93-94% mark during each month of the Autumn Term 2020, despite various local and national Covid-19 restrictions (even during November’s lockdown, where the figures dropped only slightly). Despite this the latest data shows that attendance of West Sussex Children looked after is still higher than at the equivalent stage last year during the Autumn Term 2020.
Due to the nature of children that are CLA, there is a constantly changing cohort, with an inflow and outflow of children on a regular basis.
Actions
The Virtual School will continue to work with school and other partner agencies to improve the attendance of Children Looked After through timely interventions and bespoke educational packages to support the needs of our young people.Going forward further improvement to embed better processes should continue to see the measure improve.
There are a wide range of factors that impact on school attendance such as changes in care placement and the Virtual School works with school and other partner agencies to improve the attendance of Children Looked After through timely interventions and bespoke educational packages to support the needs of our young people.
All students have an individual attendance target set within their personal educational plan.