Attendance and punctuality are key to boys making successful progress at the College.

Boys are required to arrive in school before 8.25am, any arrival after that is registered as Late. Boys who are late are required to attend a Late Detention which lasts 30 minutes after school. Boys who are persistently late will be required to register with a senior member of staff on Saturday mornings.

If you son is unexpectedly absent from school, we ask you to ‘phone or email his Pastoral Support Assistant (PSA) the same day and each subsequent day he is off.  Parents will be asked to provide medical evidence if the pupil is off school for more than 3 days, for pupils who have a high absence rate this may be asked on the first day of absence. If medical evidence is not provided then this attendance will be marked as unauthorised.

If you know your son will be absent from school (for example, for a doctor’s appointment), please write to the Head of Line a few days in advance.  If a pupil needs to leave school during the day, he will be issued with a permission slip.

Our expectation is that all pupils should have an attendance of 95% or higher.

Requests for absence from school

Parents may request that their child be absent from school for a specific reason, however this must be for exceptional circumstances. Any request must be by using the form found at the bottom of this page and sent to the Head of Line outlining the dates and the reason why the absence is required. If the school does not grant the request, any absence for that period will be marked as unauthorised.

Persistent Absence

The Department for Education categorises all pupils who have attendance below 90% as persistently absent. Usually achieving a percentage score of 90% would represent success, however when it comes to attendance it is the reverse. A missed school day is a lost opportunity to learn and an attendance percentage of 90% for the year equates to just under 20 days or 4 weeks absence with 120 lessons missed. If this attendance percentage is kept over the course of a pupil’s time at the College from Year 7 to Year 11 then the pupil will have been absent for 20 weeks or one and half terms, missing a total of around 600 lessons.

The Department for Education has carried out research in 2022 which shows the link between attendance and achievement in public examinations. As you can see from the table below, the percentage of pupils achieving good grades drops dramatically for those with 90% attendance and further still for those with 80% attendance.

The College works alongside the Merton Educational Welfare Service to ensure that high standards of attendance are kept. This involves weekly meeting between the Head of Line and the Educational Welfare Officer (EWO) with a specific focus on pupils with persistent absence and levels of unauthorised absence.

We will work closely with you as parents to ensure that your child has a high level of attendance. We will notify parents of pupils with attendance which is consistently below 90% . If there is no improvement over time then parents will be invited to a meeting with the Head of Line and the EWO to discuss ways forward.
As it is a parent’s statutory duty to ensure their child is in school, severe levels of absence can result in the College asking the Local Authority to action via a Penalty Notice Warning which could then lead to a fine.