⟡ We Notified You of Medical Risk. You Sent an Attendance Warning. ⟡
Filed: 3 May 2022
Reference: SWANK/EDU/2022-DRAYTON-ANNABELLE
📎 Download PDF — 2022-05-03_SWANK_DraytonParkSchool_AttendanceLetter_Annabelle_MonitoringPretext.pdf
I. The Reply to Illness Was Surveillance
This letter from Drayton Park Primary School is many things:
Formatted with courtesy
Drenched in policy language
Seemingly benign
But it is, in fact, a procedural smokescreen — sent in response not to neglect or truancy, but to a parent’s prior disclosures of documented medical vulnerability.
You raised a health alert.
They raised a spreadsheet.
II. What the Letter Does (and Doesn’t) Say
It references:
Attendance thresholds
Code H
Authorised absences
It does not reference:
Medical conditions
Disability risk
The child’s asthma status
Prior communications
It is, as ever, the standard reply to complexity: flatten it into a metric.
III. Why SWANK Filed It
Because attendance letters are no longer neutral.
Because they now function as pre-safeguarding positioning tools, often sent after parents disclose medical concern or lawful refusal of in-person contact.
Because when you read enough of them, they all start to whisper:
We’re watching — but we won’t acknowledge what we see.
This is not just paperwork. It is soft jurisdictional threat, typeset in school stationery.
IV. SWANK’s Position
We do not accept attendance enforcement as a proxy for procedural intimidation.
We do not consider polite formatting to be protection.
We do not confuse concern for compliance.
Let the record show:
The child was medically vulnerable
The absences were lawful
The tone was disciplinary
And the letter — was archived