Attendance & absence

We've worked with the Department for Education to pull together best practice for monitoring and challenging your school's attendance figures. Find out how to question your senior leaders and benchmark against local and national data.

Your school or trust should have a proactive attendance strategy that helps to drive improvement in the long term. Find out what good looks like, and what questions to ask to monitor the impact of your strategy.

Be clear on what’s in the guidance, and what's expected from you, when it comes to improving school attendance. Use our example questions to make sure your leaders are prioritising attendance and that your school/trust is compliant.

Read our 1-page summary of the rules on school absence, attendance and term-time holidays.

Understand the rules on pupil absence, including your school's admission register and attendance register. We summarise the laws you'll need to know about, and also look at parent penalties and authorised absence.