[eal-bilingual] And now another favour

In a meeting at school today we discussed intervention programmes and
the fact that the larger majority of children taking part in catch-up
activities are the same children and are those with regular, poor
attendance.  This then lead to a discussion about attendance altogether
(our school is failing to hit Government targets) and on to the pros and
cons of children going on extended leave (cons in the opinion of most
taking part in the discussion; there are benefits relating to improved
home language, sense of connection and self esteem in my opinion).  Our
headteacher has tried the coaxing route and the threatening route to try
to get parents not to take their children from school during term time,
with little lasting impact (though for the most part parents are now
better at planning these holidays around longer school breaks).  We also
had a quick look at the 'official' and extremely wordy letter which the
head sends out to parents to point out the negative effects of taking
their child out of school.

With regard to regular poor attendance, one classteacher stated they had
begun to tell parents that if they want their children to get good exam
results and go on to get good jobs, they need to bring them to school on
time so they don't fall.  They had had some, limited, success with this.
Another teacher had commonly heard it expressed in the community that
primary school wasn't really important and that it was secondary school
and GCSE's that count.  They felt this impacted on the lack of parental
pressure/sense of urgency in making reluctant children come to school.  

We also shared anecdotal evidence of children talking about how late
they go to bed. 

So, my favour: I offered to:

*	re-word the formal extended leave letter to make it parent
friendly;

*	produce a leaflet about the problems caused by children
regularly being late and/or missing school (particularly to raise
awareness of the impact falling behind in primary school will have on a
child's secondary career)

*	source information/leaflets on the benefits of children going to
bed at a decent time 

*	and get all the above translated into the languages spoken in
our school (predominantly Bengali, then Arabic). 

But thought I'd check first to see if anyone had already produced
anything along those lines?  

Alison