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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 Advisory 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.

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

Also see