Headteacher Message
Hello all,
Happy New Year. 2026, officially the year of the Darell. This is going to be a great year for the school. We have the best staff team in the world (officially recognised by our own statisticians), the best children and the best parents and carers.
I am going to start the term by making an appeal to you all. Please keep sending your children to school on time unless they are not well enough to be here. At the end of last term, our whole school attendance was at 90%. Now, if you scored this in a test, you would be happy, but in terms of attendance, it means that 1 out of every 10 children is not in school. We need to improve this. The national average is 96%. But, being a competitive soul, I want to be better than this by the end of the year.
Some schools give out individual awards for attendance. For instance, some children get 100% attendance certificates at the end of the term. I fundamentally disagree with this because children cannot help being ill and ill children should not be in school. However, I do like rewards, so I have set up the following for the rest of the year:
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We now have three teams: Year 1/2, Year 3/4 and Year 5/6. We will be monitoring attendance of these groups throughout this half-term and the team with the highest attendance will be rewarded with extra playtime in the park.
If we were finishing this competition today, it would be Year 5 and 6, who would be going to the park.
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Year group
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Attendance this week
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Year 1/2
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94.9%
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Year 3/4
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94.3%
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Year 5/6
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96.13%
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Hold on a minute!! This attendance has smashed last term's average. It is a new start, it is a new year. Well done, parents and carers. Keep up the good work.
I also used assembly to tell all our children that if we can get to our whole school target of 95% by the end of the year, the whole school will be spending a day en masse at Richmond Park. Exploring, playing and generally having fun. I have been wanting to do this for years and this seems like the perfect opportunity. While I have not included reception and nursery in the half-term attendance competition, they will be coming to the park if we can hit our targets. It is really important that our youngest children do not miss their building blocks of learning.
Reception attendance this week was 83%, so there is some room for improvement.
Have a lovely weekend with your lovely children and I look forward to seeing them all back on Monday.
