In figures released by the Department for Education (DfE) recently, Malet Lambert has been listed as the school with the best reported attendance amongst Hull secondary schools.
For the academic year 2016/17, Malet Lambert pupils only had unauthorised absences of 23.7%, compared with the poorest attending school in the area, which registered 71.2%.
The school has been working hard to encourage good attendance and Miss Pearson, assistant headteacher, feels the success at Malet is due to the brilliant support from our parents.
She said, “We’ve improved our engagement with parents and pupils in this area and as a result we have seen increased support from our parents in reporting absences and recognising the importance of attendance.
“We sent a letter out to our parents showing the correlation between attendance and progress, cross-referencing their child’s attendance figures with their current progress.
“This really hit home. Both pupils and parents could visually see the connection between the two and we saw a vast improvement in attendance and communication regarding absences.
“We were pleased with last year’s results, but we’ve already seen a 5% persistent absentee improvement on those in the first six months of the school year.”