Attendance is one of the biggest challenges facing the school system today. The aim of school attendance hubs is to enable schools with strong attendance practice to share their approaches with senior leaders in other similar schools to help them to improve. Hubs will also facilitate an ongoing professional dialogue about attendance amongst school leaders on a peer support basis.
Overview
Attendance hubs are led by schools with effective attendance practice, through LFCD attendance hub, we will share our strategies and resources for improving attendance with our partner schools.
Schools who have joined our hub will have access to half termly virtual hub meetings run by LFCD attendance leaders as an opportunity to share practice and discuss shared challenges with others. We ask that our partner schools use learning and approaches from our hub to revise their schools’ existing systems for managing attendance to drive improvement. The programme is intended for senior leaders with oversight of attendance.
Landau Forte College Derby – our vision and values
Landau Forte College Derby was purpose-built and opened in 1992 as the 14th City Technology College in England, the College became an academy in 2005. Ofsted rated Landau Forte College as ‘outstanding’ in May 2012 and the school continues to provide a great standard of education and enrichment opportunities for all its students. The College has a highly successful Sixth Form.
In partnership with parents and the local community, we hold outstanding teaching and learning at the centre of everything we do. We aim to inspire, engage and challenge all our young people, regardless of background, to be the best that they can be. We have the highest expectations of all in a supportive, happy and welcoming environment. Our students are active, responsible citizens, ready to make a difference in the local, national and global community.
Our Vision and Values
Landau Forte College has always been a diverse community. We are proud to provide excellent opportunities to all learners, irrespective of background or ability. Our school is very unique, with over 4% of our student population being in receipt of an Education Health and Care Plan, against the national average of 2%. We are passionate about inclusion and we are incredibly proud of the achievements of our young people with complex SEND needs.
Our vision at Landau Forte College is to ensure that every young person is inspired, engaged and challenged to achieve at the highest possible level. At the heart of everything we do is a strong moral purpose to ensure all young people have access to the highest quality education and enrichment experiences. We are relentlessly ambitious for our students in their future aspirations and we want their success to go beyond academic achievement.
The College aims to ensure that our young people leave as confident, healthy, secure and independent individuals who have a love of learning and are ready to make a personal contribution to society.
We do this by:
- Providing an exciting learning environment where young people feel safe, happy and valued. We will meet the educational and social needs of all our young people, regardless of ability, ethnic background or disability
- Assisting our young people to become confident, creative and questioning individuals who are strong leaders and equally effective team players
- Ensuring our staff are an inspirational, dedicated and well supported team who provided exceptional teaching experience and care for our young people
- Investing in the high quality professional development of all our staff
- Promoting high standards of achievement and attainment – our young people will be academically well qualified with a breadth of experience that has maximised all their talents and aptitudes
- Giving our young people access to a challenging, broad and balanced curriculum, including regular and frequent opportunities to participate in high quality extracurricular enrichment experiences
- Managing resources effectively and efficiently, ensuring value for money
- Building trusting and informed relationship with parents/ carers and the local community through working in a true partnership
Creating a culture of high expectations
At LFCD we underpin our drive for the very best attendance with a commitment to creating an ethos whereby all staff understand the importance of and their responsibility in supporting students to attend school, our students want to attend and our parents and families support the school in this practice.
Whilst our minimum target for attendance is 97%, we aim for 100% attendance. We are proud of the culture we have created at LFCD – our students want to attend school. They value the high quality teaching and learning and supportive pastoral care they receive. We get to know our students and their families as individuals and build positive, respectful and highly effective relationships with them. Our students want to be in school and they tell us that there is a trusted adult here that they can speak to. This is evidenced by the strong attendance of our most vulnerable groups.
We understand the impact strong attendance has on our young peoples’ outcomes and therefore their life chances and we communicate this information regularly with all in the Landau community. We regularly reinforce how important it is for our most vulnerable students to have strong attendance and achieve the very best outcomes whilst at school. We understand the transformative power of a great education!
Early intervention, impactful data analysis and removing barriers to attendance
We strategically analyse our attendance data to ensure we can intervene early, with the right students, to support our young people and their families to improve attendance. We get to know our families and our young people as individuals and understand that there is not a ‘one size fits all’ method to improve school attendance. Ensuring the very best attendance for all our young people requires a relentless but caring, firm but fair, multifaceted approach, building positive and trusting relationships. When we understand our young people and their families well we can put the right individual strategies in place to remove barriers to attendance.
Strong attendance is the expectation for all and we work very supportively, sensitively and creatively with students and families who face greater barriers to attendance. We are proud of the work we do with our young people and their families who face the most complex barriers and we look forward to sharing more detail of this work at our attendance hub meetings.
Attendance Hub Meeting Dates
The dates for our virtual hub meetings are detailed below. The meetings will start at 3.30pm and last for one hour.
- 17 April 2024
- 19 June 2024
- 18 September 2024
- 20 November 2024
- 29 January 2025
- 19 March 2025
Attendance Hub resources
Enquiries
To enquire about support from the LFCD Attendance Hub or to visit LFCD please email
Alison Brannick, Principal [email protected] or
Mark Andrews, Vice Principal [email protected]
Useful links
- DfE Attendance Hubs
- Resource for parents/carers DfE guidance for improving school attendance
- DfE Working together to improve school attendance guidance
- Public First report – Listening to and learning from parents in the attendance crisis
- ImpactEd report Understanding Attendance