Kingston primary truancy lowest in London

9:10am Saturday 25th October 2008

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Truancy at Kingston schools has dropped to its lowest ever level, with primary schools now the best attended of all London boroughs.

The success has been put down to groundbreaking new ideas, many of which have been imitated around the country, including medical tips for parents on when to keep children off school and a tough "truancy panel" which has brought prosecutions against about eight parents a year.

Figures released this week by the Department of Children, Schools and Families, show that 6.1 percent of all possible "teaching sessions" were missed by Kingston secondary pupils and 4.77 percent were absent at primary schools. The English average was 7.27 percent and 5.35 per cent respectively.

The top performing school was Tiffin Girls' School, which reported a 2.8 per cent absence rate between autumn 2007 and spring 2008.

Another measure schools are judged on - the proportion of "persistent absentees" whose attendance is below an average 80 per cent - has also improved.

Last year, 8 per cent of Chessington Community College pupils had poor attendance, placing the school under review by the Government.

Now the figure has dropped to 5.7 per cent, meaning that Kingston is one of only four councils in the country to have no schools with a serious attendance problem.

Ming Zhang, strategic manager for attendance and well being at Kingston Council refused to be complacent.

He said: "When you're high up there, the only way is to go down. The only way to maintain that position is to keep coming up with innovative ideas to deal with absences."

Kingston was the first council in the country to offer holiday vouchers to families as an incentive not to go away in term time.

In the last few years many other local authorities have followed suit.

Mr Zhang put the recent success down to medical advice leaflets given out to the parents of persistent absentees, explaining that children should not stay off school if they only have a mild sore throat or cold.

David Kemp, headteacher at drastically improved Chessington Community College, was confident truancy would be cut even further now that pupils have a completely new school.

“Now we’ve got these new facilities it’s cool to be in the school,” he said. “Some of the pupils we were having problems with before are now coming into school. They want to be here.”