The 8/12-week rule: what under-attendance actually triggers

The rule compares a child's actual attendance against their registered, agreed hours — not a flat weekly cap — and gives real slack before anything happens: the first seven weeks of under-attendance trigger no action at all, because illness, appointments, and early pickups are expected, ordinary variation.

Week eight is where it turns into a real event: continued under-attendance triggers a notification to both parent and provider, but it's a warning at that point, not a subsidy reduction. If the child meets their full registered hours for even one week before week twelve, the whole cycle resets — the rule is genuinely forgiving of a family getting back on track, not a one-strike system.

Week twelve of continuous under-attendance is where it bites: subsidy hours get permanently revised down to the actual twelve-week average, with no retroactive clawback for the weeks already passed. A separate, stricter rule covers full absence rather than under-hours — four consecutive weeks of zero attendance triggers a warning, and no return by week five suspends the subsidy outright, with exceptions available for documented illness or exceptional circumstances.

The provider carries the actual legal obligation to report and act on under-attendance here — it's not framed as a passive notification the crèche just happens to receive. Two real Pobal exemption forms exist for genuine edge cases: one for the continuous-absence rule (bereavement, once-a-year birthplace travel, an emergency accommodation move, a care-placement change, or prolonged illness, each with its own required evidence), submittable within six weeks of the period starting; and one for the persistent under-attendance rule, needing only a confirmation that regular medical or therapeutic appointments are the actual cause, submittable within ten weeks.

Because this genuinely needs a rolling window and a reset condition rather than something computed fresh from raw attendance on every page load, Bloomffy tracks it as its own precomputed rollup rather than live-deriving it — and the exemption workflow mirrors the two real forms' actual fields rather than a generic placeholder, with each deadline calculated from the exemption type and the period start date rather than stored as a column that could quietly go stale.