Sick Note for School – Template
Fill in the form and get a ready-made absence letter for school – to copy or print. Free and no sign-up required.
- Free & no sign-up
- Runs in your browser
How it works
Enter the child's name, class and dates.
Optionally add the reason and your name.
Copy or print the text and hand it in at school.
The school absence letter in detail
What belongs in an absence letter
A school absence letter is a short, informal note. It needs five details: the child's full name, the class, the period of absence, the date and the signature of a parent or guardian. One sentence about the reason is enough – ‘for health reasons’ is perfectly acceptable, and a diagnosis does not belong anywhere in it. In most school systems a school has no basis for asking for one either: it needs to know that the absence was due to illness, not what the illness was. Anyone excusing several days in a row gives a start and an end date, so the school can sign off the whole period at once. If single lessons rather than whole days were missed, the periods belong in the text. This template produces exactly that wording and then lets you adjust it freely.
Handwritten, printed or digital
Which form a school accepts is set out in its school rules. Three routes are common: the handwritten slip in the school bag, the printed and signed letter, and a digital report through a school portal. The printed route has a practical advantage: the text stays legible, the date is fixed, and a copy can be kept at home. Anyone who prefers to copy the generated text out by hand can do that too; the template is only a scaffold. What matters is the handwritten signature, because only that turns the statement into the parents' excuse. Some schools accept an email without a signature, others do not – when in doubt, check the school rules.
Deadline, doctor's note and the limits of a template
An absence letter is not a doctor's certificate. It confirms that the parents know about the absence and approve it; a certificate attests to an illness. From which day a school additionally requires a certificate – if it requires one at all – is set by the rules your school works under, and those rules differ sharply from one system to the next. In Germany it is the school law of the federal state plus the individual school's own rules; in England, Department for Education guidance tells schools not to request medical evidence routinely and to ask only where there is genuine and reasonable doubt. There is no figure that travels, so the school's attendance policy is the document to read. Many sets of school rules also give a deadline for handing the letter in, often a few days after the child returns; missing it risks the absence being counted as unexcused. This template helps with the wording, but it replaces neither the school's rules nor a certificate.
Frequently asked questions
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