Attendance Officer

Attendance Officer - Part Time - 22.5 hours per week - Term Time only

PURPOSE OF JOB

• The Attendance Officer is appointed to the school establishment in order to perform a variety of administrative and clerical tasks, to provide support to children, staff, parents and assisting in daily office needs and the organisation’s general administrative activities 
• To contribute to promoting the overall ethos, values and aims of the school.

DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE TO:

Headteacher 

FUNCTIONALLY RESPONSIBLE TO:

Headteacher

RESPONSIBLE FOR:  

Attendance

PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTABILITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Attendance

• To contribute to raising achievement by improving school attendance
• To provide a specialist service to assist the school in meeting their obligations and targets in relation to school attendance, especially persistent absence. 
• To promote positive attitudes by students and families towards education and to ensure that parents are made fully aware of their statutory responsibilities. 
• To establish and develop a professional service to support the school in raising attendance, investigating persistent absences and improving punctuality. 
• To establish the reason for non attendance, make assessments and agree a plan for facilitating a return to school using appropriate strategies within specified timescales.
• To initiate appropriate legal action with Education Welfare Service (EWS) to ensure the school is carrying out its statutory responsibility in respect of students.  This will include preparing statements, attending and presenting evidence or request the issuing of penalty notice fines or other legal sanctions and completion of Common Assessment Form (CAF) referrals.
• To be fully aware of and carry out all work in line with Child Protection Procedures.  This may involve attending case conferences, strategy and planning meetings as well as core groups or other meetings in relation to child protection cases that require input

Office duties

• To manage Parentpay, including setting up new products and services, queries and updates, printing barcodes, supporting parents with queries, managing trips, printing reports as necessary and end of year updates
• To manage Groupcall – sending messages to parents and staff 
• To assist with ID verification 
• To record and manage staff absences and report as necessary
• To update the attendance data on the school website
• To manage the Attendance Awards (Certificates, trips)
• To offer admin support for Teachers, SLT and external parties

Responsibilities

• To advise the school on strategies to promote the regular and punctual attendance of all students and assist with the implementation of the strategies. 
• Meet with school staff, students and parents to identify individual problems and possible solutions. 
• To make unsupervised contact with families in response to allocated referrals i.e. home visits and /or meetings in school.  
• To initiate appropriate legal action with Education Welfare Service (EWS) to ensure the school is carrying out its statutory responsibility in respect of students.  This will include preparing statements, attending and presenting evidence or request the issuing of penalty notice fines or other legal sanctions and completion of Common Assessment Form (CAF) referrals.  
• To liaise and work with other members of EWS as well as other professionals in police, Social Services, Housing , Health and any other statutory and voluntary organisations. 
• To keep clear and concise records of all consultations and to write any other reports i.e. annual action plan and summaries, as required for the school.
• To use IT systems to produce reports, often to tight timescales, using word processing and record information including statistical data, providing reports to senior managers and other professionals.
• To manage and prioritise your own workload in line with service requirements.