Attendance and Absence
Regular attendance at school is vital for your child’s educational progress.
If you need to report your child's absence from school, please contact the school office team.
If you have any questions or concerns about your child's attendance at school related to safeguarding or keeping your child safe, please contact Ms Capon - our Family Liaison Officer. Ask for Ms Capon when contacting the school office, or emailing parent@bjs.rbksch.org and asking her to get in touch with you.
Policy
To view our Attendance Policy, please click here.
Request for Pupil Absence from School (including holidays)
Your child’s attendance in school has a direct impact on their learning.
Kingston Education Authority expects all parents/carers to ensure that their children attend school whenever possible. Absences due to holidays taken during school time could hinder academic progress. Without school’s permission, such absences are treated as truancy and may lead to parental prosecution.
By law, Headteachers have the power to delete a child’s name from the school’s roll should parents arrange for him/her to go away for holidays in term time and without school’s permission.
In such circumstances, your child’s school would not be able to guarantee a school place on his/her return and their place may be filled from our waiting list. Therefore, when returning from holiday you may have to apply to a new school.
We appreciate that there are exceptional circumstances under which you may need to take your child out of school however we cannot guarantee that such absence will be authorised.
You will need to complete and return a request for absence form available from the school office, or by completing this Google form, at least four weeks before your intended departure date. Please let us know that you have completed the form.
Please try to arrange hospital, doctors, dental, examination appointments etc outside school hours. However where this is not possible please inform the school office that your child will be absent by 9am on the date of the appointment. We would also request that you put this in writing.
Useful Links
Children Missing from Education
We follow DfE guidelines when children go missing from education. For information regarding the borough's fixed penalty notice charge, please see the link below.
Additional information can be found by clicking on the attachment at the bottom of this page.
Please see the links below for more information:
Suspension and Exclusion from School
Suspension and exclusion are disciplinary measures which the head teacher of a school can use to deal with incidents of poor behaviour.
When a child’s behaviour is not showing signs of improvement, the school works with other professionals and agencies to support the child and their family. Persistent negative behaviour or serious incidents may lead to suspension and/or exclusion. This decision is taken by the Headteacher. If a child is suspended, the school follows Achieving for Children’s exclusion procedures and Kingston’s policy and guidelines. For further details, please see our behaviour policy.
At the bottom of this page you will find a leaflet for parents provided by Achieving for Children (for schools in Kingston and Richmond).
Please see also the government's school exclusion guidelines by clicking here.
Absence due to Covid-19
In line with government guidance, our priority is to deliver face-to-face, high-quality education to all pupils. The evidence is clear that being out of education causes significant harm to educational attainment, life chances, mental and physical health.
Please click on the link below to read up-to-date guidance from the UK Health Security Agency regarding Covid-19 and isolation.