How to utilise data

Schools:

• Name a member of the Senior Leadership Team to have full oversight of school absence and data analysis. This member of staff will be named on the school’s Attendance Policy.
• Monitor daily, weekly, and termly attendance data to identify patterns and trends and understand which pupils and pupil cohorts to focus resources on.
• Proactively use data to identify cohorts with, or at risk of, low attendance and develop strategies to support them.
• Regularly monitor data for all vulnerable groups to understand the needs and barriers to attendance which may affect these pupils. This knowledge must then be used to make strategic decisions about the allocation of resources to improve the outcomes for these groups’ attendance. Analysis must then be discussed at board and Governing Body meetings and with Local Authorities.
• Work in partnership with the Local Authority at a strategic and individual level for children in care.
• Subscribe to the DfE live data sharing process via Wonde. Guidance for sharing daily pupil attendance data (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Academy Councillors and Governing Bodies:

• To use data for the whole school to understand patterns of attendance, compare with other local schools, identify areas of progress and where greater focus is needed.
• Regularly review attendance data for all pupils (including all vulnerability groups) and students at risk of becoming persistently absent or severely persistently absent.
• Help school leaders focus support on the pupils who need it and discuss and challenge trends in data.

Local Authorities:

• Track local attendance data to prioritise support and unblock area-wide attendance barriers where they impact numerous schools.
• Use attendance data from all schools in the area to identify the pupil cohorts, schools, and neighbourhoods/towns where there are attendance or wider welfare concerns on which to focus efforts. This includes benchmarking against neighbouring local authorities (both geographic and statistical) and regional and national averages to identify patterns and trends of concern.
• Provide a local authority analysis of absence data based on the school Census for the previous academic year and use live VYED from the DfE to review the current academic year.

• The National Statistics release of the Census data looks at pupil absence for the previous academic year and is open-source data, available here: Pupil absence in schools in England, Academic year 2022/23 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK (explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk)
• Live DfE absence data is available for all schools here: Pupil attendance in schools, Week 21 2024 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK (explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk).
• Live school absence data collated via Wonde is available to be view by using your school’s DfE login View your education data
• Using your school MIS system’s analysis tools.
• The DfE provide headline data for benchmarking for Local Authorities and schools. However, schools are required to analyse their own school absence data and drill down by whole school/year group/pupil /vulnerability groups etc, analysing absence data and using this to inform their practice.