School attendance guidance and updates.
School Attendance Process team
The School Attendance Process team replaces the Education Welfare Service. It’s a new service that focuses exclusively on statutory functions relating to education matters, and it forms part of the newly formed Attendance, Missing and Home Education Service.
The School Attendance Process team carries out statutory action for unsatisfactory school attendance matters at the request of schools and academies. This includes issuing penalty notices and undertaking prosecutions in relation to unsatisfactory school attendance, timekeeping and unauthorised leave of absence taken during term time.
The DfE has issued statutory guidance for schools and academies: Working together to improve school attendance.
In line with the new guidance, the local authority targeted support for attendance will be supported by the Inclusion Support Service. This will be managed through the Inclusion Framework meetings conducted by the Inclusion Support Advisory Teacher who has been assigned to your school. They will be able to offer guidance and signpost to relevant services. Cases where there is a need for a specific plan, school will be asked to complete a Targeted and Specialist referral form.
More information about penalty notices and the Penalty Notices Code of Conduct is available on the Derbyshire County Council website.
Penalty notice toolkit
The local authority provides a penalty notice toolkit which we strongly advise schools make use of. This contains the penalty notice request form, templates, guidance documents and detailed one-sheet process checksheets. Also included is an update bulletin to schools with important updates and reminders about the process, which schools should review and share with relevant staff.
This toolkit is updated for the start of each term and is available on Perspective Lite only. It can be found in the General folder for that term's starting month (autumn - September General; spring - January General; summer - April General).
Help videos
The Attendance Process Team have created help videos on the penalty notice process, to provide guidance to schools on the process for requesting a penalty notice and to highlight some of the key issues the team sees while processing requests from schools. The videos have been split into chapters, to assist with finding information on the various parts of the process.
Holiday penalty notice request help video
Attendance penalty notice request help video
Contact information
The School Attendance Process team can be contacted at:
CS.AttendanceProcessTeam@derbyshire.gov.uk