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How to Utilise Data

As poor attendance is habitual, prevention and early intervention is crucial. The key to this is regular data analysis to both identify and provide immediate additional support to pupils or pupil cohorts that need it, and to look at historic and emerging patterns across the school and develop strategies to address them. As per the DfE ‘Working Together to Improve School Attendance’ guidance Sept 2022, the DfE have the following expectations. Working together to improve school attendance (publishing.service.gov.uk)

  • Monitor and analyse weekly attendance patterns and trends and deliver intervention and support in a targeted way to pupils and families.
  • When analysing patterns, some schools, especially secondary schools, may wish to look further into patterns of attendance within a session to ensure all pupils are attending all timetabled lessons.
  • Identify the pupils who need support and focus staff efforts on developing targeted actions for those cases.
  • Conduct thorough analysis of half-termly, termly, and full year data to identify patterns and trends.
  • Benchmark their attendance data (at whole school, year group and cohort level) against local, regional, and national levels to identify areas of focus for improvement.
  • Provide data and reports to support the work of the board or governing body.

  • Attendance data can be used to assist schools to make decisions on school practice
  • Be prepared for OFSTED inspection
  • The school will be able to gather patterns of absence
  • The school will be able to identify vulnerable groups in need of support
  • Schools can establish a better understanding of their cohort and the impact of targeted support for their pupils
  • Data can assist with safeguarding

The DfE also suggests that schools should decide which cohorts of pupils should be included in their data analysis based on their context and school population. This may include: boys and girls, year groups, pupils with special educational needs or disabilities, pupils with a social worker or who are looked-after by the local authority, pupils eligible for free school meals, and any pupils from backgrounds (including ethnicities, religions or beliefs, or sexual orientations where applicable) in the school community that have, or have historically had, lower attendance than their peers.

The ‘Working Together to Improve School Attendance’ guidance, states that governors and trusts should place more importance on the school attendance data analysis.

As per the OFSTED framework titled ‘School Inspection’ and the ‘Understanding your Data: A guide for school governors and academy trustee’ guidance: see link School inspection handbook - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) & guidance titled Understanding your data: a guide for school governors and academy trustees - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

School should be able to demonstrate during an inspection the following:

  • Deliver intervention in a targeted way, in response to data or intelligence.
  • Monitor and analyse attendance data regularly to ensure that intervention is delivered quickly to address absence (register inspections, code analysis, cohort and group monitoring, punctuality, lesson attendance across subjects and benchmarking).
  • Use attendance, pastoral and SEND staff who are skilled in supporting pupils and their families to identify and overcome barriers to attendance.
  • Create action plans in partnership with families and other agencies that may be supporting families, for example, children’s social care and early help services. Commission or deliver interventions to improve attendance.
  • Monitor the impact of any intervention, making adjustments if necessary and using findings to inform future strategy.
  • Where interventions fail to address attendance issues, identify the reasons why and, where appropriate, change or adjust the intervention.
  • Follow local authority codes of conduct, policies and procedures and make referrals for statutory intervention when interventions have not resulted in improved attendance and relevant triggers / thresholds are met.

Longer term DfE’s intention is for this new method of data sharing to replace existing statutory data returns to local authorities and DfE, including the school census. This will reduce the burden on schools and improve both Local Authority and DfE’s understanding of attendance patterns at local, regional, and national levels. We encourage schools to sign up for the new DfE Wonde.

Our webinar on ‘how to analyse data’ contains additional information on why utilising data is so important, and how to prepare your data for an OFSTED inspection. Please see our webinar section for further information and upcoming dates and recordings.