First Federation Trust
Reporting an absence
Please call our 24 Hour Absence Line as soon as you know your child will be absent through illness on 01395 572940, or message the school via the MyEd app, at the latest by 8.55. (Please note: it is not enough to ask a sibling to pass a message on, we must hear from a parent).
Where a child is absent from school and we have not received any verbal or written communication from the parent, we initiate the first day contact procedures. If no message is left with the school office, we will first message the parents through our MyEd system. If no response is received, we will then telephone in turn each of the contacts on the list provided by the parents.
If we are still unable to get confirmation as to why the child is not at school, we will proceed to a welfare check (this is a visit to the home address). This is normally carried out by the senior staff from the school or the Education Welfare Officer (EWO). If we are still unable to confirm the child’s welfare, we will call 101 to report the child as missing.
This is the school’s duty of care and safeguarding for your child.
Holiday Authorisation
We must remind parents that Mr Spraggon is unable to authorise family holidays unless there are ‘exceptional circumstances’. As a school we are required to notify Devon County Council if a child has 10 unauthorised sessions (so 5 full days) and it is now their policy to issue Penalty Fines – this means that a week’s school missed could incur a fine. We have had many cases where parents have asked for holiday permission because they have booked and made an error with term dates. We are not able to grant these requests, so please do check term dates on www.sidmouth-primary.devon.sch.uk/term-dates/ carefully before booking.