PEMBROKESHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL has agreed to changes in the way it will issue penalty notices for low school attendance.

The Council had intended to use a 12-week rolling period but after consultation it was agreed that the council should not proceed with the idea because of the burden placed on schools.

At the Council’s Cabinet meeting on Monday (May 23), Councillors agreed that a notice would be issued if a pupil’s attendance dropped below 90% in the school year.

Cabinet Member for Education and Safeguarding, Cllr Sue Perkins said: “We’re obliged under Welsh Government regulations to administer penalty notices and this report simplifies and clarifies the criteria under which the penalty notices might be considered.

“There are a range of views about the use of penalty notices and a fair degree of opposition to the policy as a whole, however it is the law in Wales and we are expected to implement it.

“In Pembrokeshire, we will base every decision we make on penalty notices on the circumstances of each individual case and we will not operate a blanket policy.

“We must acknowledge that school attendance is crucially important to children’s achievement as the data shows.

“The penalty notices are an option in some cases where we think that the child’s educational prospects are suffering because of excessive and unauthorised absence from school.”

Head of Performance & Community, Mr James White added: “The penalty notices are an option to be used in some circumstances but it’s part of the tool kit around attendance and it is far from being the only thing that we do.

“We have six pupil support officers working on the attendance agenda with our schools and the penalty notice workload would be less than half of one of those posts so it is a small fraction of the resource that we put into this.

“If the standard of teaching is good and the educational offer is good then the attendance will almost certainly be good and that is probably the key message.”

Cllr Adams asked about the relevance of a recent court case in England but James White added: “There are two issues which make the high court judgement, I think, not so relevant in Wales.

“One of which is, education is devolved in Wales and there is a different policy framework around it although the high court does have jurisdiction over England and Wales.

“The second point is, in England they take the view that any term time holiday absence, they will take action against it whereas in Wales we take the view that action could be taken if it takes a child’s attendance below 90%.

“In Wales, we have a view that a moderate amount of absence during term time can be authorised by head teachers if they think it’s not going to damage the child’s education prospects.”

Cllr Huw George said: “The issue of these notices is the last resort, are we doing everything we can to make sure that the school/home agreement is clear for parents that they have buy-in and they understand from the beginning because otherwise schools are being looked at in a negative light and that’s not fair because schools are there to educate and I welcome the last proposal where we take away ‘holiday in term time’.

“It’s not about holidays it’s about attendance in school.”

James White added: “We’ve issued 26 penalty notices so far which I think demonstrates that we’re not trigger happy about this and we consider cases on their merits and we do it were we feel the point needs to be made.

“Other authorities have gone well into three figures on this and that shows we are being reasonably sparing in our application of this.”