Attendance

Research shows that pupils who attend school regularly achieve higher grades than those who do not.

For a child in care, school can be the only constant in their life, and a point of stability and security. The Virtual School works to ensure that every child in care has an appropriate full-time programme of education and is committed to working with schools, carers, other professionals and young people themselves to overcome obstacles to regular attendance and ensure positive educational outcomes for our children in care. The Virtual School has high expectations of our children and encourages full attendance and punctuality.

We expect Carers to promote and support full attendance at school, and to avoid absence, unless absolutely essential.

Carers should try to arrange appointments and meetings outside school time wherever possible.

To address any attendance issues, we ask that schools:

• Inform us when the attendance level for any Child in Care drops below 95%. This information will be passed to the relevant Education Support Officers who will follow this up with the relevant Social Worker
• Contact Foster Carers, when a Child in Care fails to arrive for school on any given day, to ascertain the reason for non-attendance
• The Virtual School employ Welfare Call for all schools to help us to monitor our children that are placed in schools outside of Wolverhampton. Welfare Call make daily contact with schools to gather attendance information from those schools on our behalf

Holidays in term time

The Virtual School does not support holidays in term time.

Carers should not take children & young people in care out of school for holidays during term time. Social care will not give authorisation for children’s holidays during term time, unless in very exceptional circumstances. If a carer feels that exceptional circumstances apply in such a case, they should submit a request to their child’s social worker, who will forward the request in writing to the Virtual School Head. As the authorising officer on behalf of the local authority, the VSH will consider the request and provide a written response to the social worker within 10 working days of receipt of the request. The VSH will discuss the request with the child’s school and other managers and arrive at a decision.