Is 95% attendance a realistic expectation?

I currently have around 85% attendance and my school is calling a meeting with my parents to discuss why my attendance is so 'bad'. My school has a policy of 95% and they've said I'm not allowed any more days off this whole year (they can do one), otherwise they're threatening to refer me to my doctor because of my frequent illness. Can they actually do this? And out of interest, do you think 95% attendance is a realistic expectation of year 11 students?

I currently have around 85% attendance and my school is calling a meeting with my parents to discuss why my attendance is so 'bad'. My school has a policy of 95% and they've said I'm not allowed any more days off this whole year (they can do one), otherwise they're threatening to refer me to my doctor because of my frequent illness. Can they actually do this? And out of interest, do you think 95% attendance is a realistic expectation of year 11 students?

I think that is a realistic expectation yes. In fact, I think an expectation that you should attend whenever you are able is realistic. Why should you have any time off that could be avoidable? Over a whole year I'd imagine this would work out to something like 98-100% attendance depending on if you get ill a lot.

However, referring you to your doctor? That just sounds silly. If you are ill then you are ill and there isn't much they can do about that. I could understand them having a meeting/specific teachers having meetings for absences to discuss how to ensure you catch up, but other than that you can't help being ill. I can't see what any doctor would do with this information anyway.

It seems especially ludicrous at this point of the year, where you must only have had around 4 days off. It's quite reasonable for someone to be ill for 4 days, especially if they manage to catch a sickness bug before AND after xmas which means you aren't ALLOWED to come in!

xxx

it's absolute *******s. what especially gets on my tits is how, even though my parents will authorise an absence, it still goes against my record! it should only be the ones i purposely don't show up for which count against me.

especially when i have to drive for sometimes up to 75 minutes to get to college, ****ing ridiculous to expect i'm not going to pull a regular sickie.

(it's usually 40 mins max in the car but the floods recently have made traffic ****ing ridiculous)

Ha, this made me laugh I feel your pain

My attendance was pretty bad in year 11 but I had an excuse and I still got good grades. I used to suffer from excruciatingly horrible period pains which meant that I often couldn't go in. I also didn't really like to attempt to go in to at least sit in a few lessons because:
- I lived far
- My mum doesn't have a care
- You're not allowed to go home by yourself when sick
- My mum would have to take 3 buses just to come and collect me
- I'd spend ages waiting in the nurse's room to go home
The teachers at my school were ****ing ***** and didn't try to understand my situation at all, especially the male teachers who were unfortunately the ones who were in charge of dealing with this (head of year etc). They said I could attempt to come in and often harassed my mum by constantly calling her whenever I wasn't in which made no sense really. Eventually I started doing something that solved my problems so the pain wouldn't disrupt my exams and then there were no problems. If you have an illness, then it's understandable but I think 95% is realistic I guess, at least by the end of the year anyway. I currently have 96% attendance at college but although some people's attendance is much lower than mine, the percentage will continue to increase for every lesson they attend so it won't stay too low.