Four audiences, one dataset #
Attendance reporting used to be a termly job. It is not any more. Sharing daily attendance data with the DfE has been mandatory from the start of the 2024 to 2025 academic year for maintained schools, academies, special schools and alternative provision academies, either through an automatic daily extraction or a manual weekly submission.
On top of that sit the local authority's expectations, the school census three times a year, and the school's own internal reporting to leadership and governors.
The raw material is identical in every case. What differs is the cut, the period and the format. Which means the honest description of the job is not "producing attendance reports", it is "re-cutting the same numbers four times for four readers", and that is exactly the shape of work that should not be done by hand.
What the statutory position now is #
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Registers must be electronic
The statutory guidance, last updated on 9 July 2026, requires the admission and attendance registers to be kept electronically, and expects schools to use a management information system so that returns to local authorities and the DfE are easier.
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Registers are legal records
Every entry must be preserved for six years. Amendments must show the original entry, the amended entry, the reason, the date and the name of the person who made it.
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Daily sharing is mandatory
The DfE guidance, last updated on 19 December 2025, sets out the required pupil data items and the two routes for sending them.
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Ofsted now sees some of it
The same guidance states that from November 2025 the DfE started sharing some school-level attendance data with Ofsted.
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The census runs three times a year
Autumn, spring and summer, and the guidance on completing it was last updated on 16 September 2026.
That last point about Ofsted changes the stakes of the first point.
Where the hours actually go #
Not in the statutory returns. Those are largely a system function once the registers are right. The hours go into everything downstream of them:
- the weekly or fortnightly attendance report for the leadership team
- the list of pupils crossing a threshold, rebuilt by hand each time
- the termly governors' paper, usually reformatted from the leadership one
- the local authority's own template, which never matches either
- the chase list for the office, which is a fifth cut of the same data
The Workload Reduction Taskforce's January 2024 list of 23 administrative tasks that should not require a teacher names producing and collating analyses of attendance figures at item 8, and reformatting data or re-entry of data into multiple systems at item 2. Both describe this page exactly.
Which parts run on rules #
Every cut listed above. What needs a person is everything that happens after the report.
Runs on rules
- A report that always contains the same fields, for the same period, against the same thresholds, in the same layout
- Flagging the pupils who have crossed a line this week
- Checking that the register has no unexplained sessions older than five working days, which is the deadline the statutory guidance sets for entering the correct code
Fixed trigger, fixed steps, fixed output.
Needs a person
- Deciding what the pattern means for this child
- Deciding whether a family needs support or a formal step
- Deciding what to say to a governing board that has seen the number fall
None of it starts until somebody has read the report.
The data question #
Attendance data is personal data about children, including, in the daily return, special educational needs information. The school is the data controller for all of it, whatever route it travels. Any supplier in the chain is a processor acting on the school's instructions. Decide that, and record it, before changing how any of this moves.
The cost of admin time calculator will price the re-cutting across a year. The page upstream of this one is first day absence calls, where the data being reported here is created in the first place.