Dear Parents/Carers,
I hope that your child’s experience over the past 3-4 weeks at Strood Academy has been extremely positive. We maintain unapologetically high expectations and this includes your child’s attendance.
Attending the academy every day is crucial to your child’s success in their assessments in year 7, but more importantly to prepare them for their year 11 and 13 final exams. The Department for Education suggests that if attendance falls below 96%, attainment is negatively affected. Even for high-achieving students poor attendance has a significant negative impact on their grades. It has been shown that missing just 17 days of school in Year 7 (and annually through to year 11) reduces final GCSE grades by one grade across all subjects. This could easily prevent your child from getting an apprenticeship or into the university or career of their choice.
The average Strood Academy year 7 attendance is 96.1%. Whilst on average this is reasonably high, we have noticed a large number of illness reports for year 7 students. Whilst we completely sympathise and understand that some students have chronic illnesses or accidents/operations that require time spent in hospital, if your child has a cough, cold, sore throat, headache etc please send them into the academy. We can support these minor illnesses by having medication in the college bases and allowing them to take them at break and lunch times. We also have the ‘On Call’ system where students can request the ‘On Call’ pastoral staff member to come to their lesson and support them if they feel unwell. We support our students to be resilient young people and come to school even with these minor illnesses and attempt their studies in the academy. I ask for your support in this also.
You can access your child’s up to date attendance figure on MCAS. Please discuss your child’s current attendance figure with them regularly and agree how you can work together to ensure that this figure is as high as possible.
If you have any queries about attendance figures, illness, penalty notices, medical evidence etc then please refer to our policy on the academy website. Please also email attendance@stroodacademy.org for any further queries.
Yours faithfully,
Mrs G West | Assistant Principal- Attendance
