How to evaluate your school/trust's absence and attendance figures

Regularly review attendance data and help your leaders focus improvement efforts

This involves:

• Regularly reviewing attendance data at board meetings, including:
• Looking at trends within your school(s)
• Benchmarking with other schools
• The Department for Education (DfE) has produced focused reports to support you to do this. Find out about these in the sections below
• Paying particular attention to pupil cohorts that have had poor attendance historically, or face entrenched barriers to attendance. For example, pupils:
  • With a social worker
  • From a background or ethnicity where attendance has been low 
  • With a long-term medical condition
  • With special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND)
  • Who are eligible for free school meals (FSM)
• Working with your senior leaders to set goals or areas of focus for attendance, and providing challenge and support on these areas – learn how to how to monitor your school/trust's attendance strategy

This is explained in paragraph 78 of the Department for Education (DfE)'s statutory guidance on working together to improve school attendance. 

Read our article on your role in improving school attendance to understand your other duties under the guidance.

Understand the rules and what persistent and severe absence mean

It will be easier to assess whether your school's attendance data and procedures are good if you have a good grasp of the law. 

If you need to know more about the attendance rules, we've produced a short summary.

• Persistent absence is when a pupil misses 10% or more of school
• This is equal to 1 day or more every 2 weeks
• Severe absence is when a pupil misses more than 50% of school

 This is set out in paragraphs 132 and 133 of the attendance guidance.

Scrutinise school-level data using your school or trust's attendance summary report

This report is a half-termly summary, based on the daily attendance data that schools share with the DfE. It's designed to help you see trends, evaluate the effectiveness of current strategies and focus improvement efforts. 

You'll need to request it from your senior leaders, as it's available from the DfE's Monitor your school attendance service, which requires a DfE sign-in. You don't need to log in to the portal yourself, as it's for school/trust leaders, but the DfE is encouraging leaders to share this report with their governing boards.

The report is currently available for mainstream primary and secondary schools, but will be rolled out for other school types in the near future. We'll update this article when this happens.

What's in the report?

It contains:

• Headline data on your overall attendance and persistent absence, compared to the national average 
• The weekly attendance levels in your school tracked against the national average
• A comparison of attendance for different pupil groups (e.g. pupils with special educational needs (SEN) and pupils eligible for FSM) compared with the national average and the previous academic year
• A table showing the number of pupils in each 5% band of absence severity, by year group (more on this below)

Trust reports will show all of these things across all eligible schools (mainstream primaries and secondaries) within a trust. If you're a trustee, this can help you to identify variation between schools and direct support appropriately.

Use the report to inform the questions you ask your leaders about attendance and absence – we've suggested some below.

Use the absence bandings table to look beyond the headline data

Your leaders will have access to a more detailed version of this table in a separate report, which allows them to see which individual pupils fall into each banding. Even though the data shared with your board doesn't include this, the absence bandings table you do have can help you to discuss trends and strategies.

Below is a sample table provided by the DfE. The absence bandings table in your summary report will look similar to this, showing absence split into 5% bandings by year group. (Sixth form year groups aren't included.)

Unlike the school leaders' version, your table won't show identifiable data for individual pupils.

As you can see above, the report your school leaders will share with you will show data for each 5% absence banding, split by year group.

Ask your school leaders whether any particular pupil groups are disproportionately represented

They should be able to explain what lies behind the data, e.g.:

• A higher number of pupils missing more than 20% of school in year 11 is driven by a group of girls eligible for FSM
• A higher number of year 10 pupils missing more than 50% of school compared to other year groups reflects a larger cohort of children with SEN in that year

This information will allow you to hold your school leaders to account for directing specific support to these groups of pupils. You should monitor the impact of any strategies your leaders put in place. Find questions to ask about this below. 

Benchmark your attendance data against schools with similar characteristics  

Like the summary report, the similar schools report is also available to your school/trust leaders every half term from the DfE's Monitor your school attendance service, which requires a DfE sign-in. Ask your leaders to share this report with your board.

It's available for mainstream primary and secondary schools. Trust leaders can also access a zipped folder containing reports for all of their schools.

What does the report show?

The report compares your school's data against 20 schools selected because they have these similar characteristics:

• The proportion of pupils:
• Eligible for free school meals (FSM)
• Receiving special educational needs (SEN) support with social, emotional and mental health needs as their primary SEN type
• With English as an additional language (EAL)
• The amount of deprivation affecting their pupils, measured by the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI)
• Geographical region and urban/rural classification
• Funding amount per pupil

In the report, you'll see a set of comparisons between your school's attendance levels and the average of the similar schools':

• Overall attendance
• Persistent absence
• Weekly attendance levels
• Attendance by pupil group 

DfE analysis suggests that around 2/3 of variation in attendance and absence levels can be accounted for by 'cohort based' factors like FSM, SEN or EAL. By comparing your school with those with similar cohorts, you'll be able to see variation that can be accounted for by your school's actual practices, rather than its pupils.

You'll be able to use this comparison over time to see the impact of your school's attendance strategy, as any change reflected within it is likely to be attributable to work your school is doing, outside of pupil demographics.

As you can see in the image above, this school has higher attendance among pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) than that of the 20 similar schools, despite having very slightly lower overall attendance. This suggests that this school's strategy for boosting attendance for these pupils is working.

Support your leaders to focus on the areas suggested by the report

The report will also list 3 'areas of relative strength' where your school's attendance is stronger than that of the similar schools. These will help you and your leaders to see what's working well. 

It will also identify 3 areas to focus on, where schools with similar pupil characteristics have achieved a higher attendance rate. This section gives you and your leaders some targeted groups to focus on where improvements will make a real difference to your overall figures, as explained in the example below:

Ask your senior leaders questions

To scrutinise your school's absence and attendance rates, ask your senior leadership team these questions:

• What patterns or trends are emerging from comparing weekly, half-termly, termly, and annual absence data?
• Are we making use of the DfE's view your education data tool to access near real time data to interpret trends?
• Is absence (and persistent absence) more widespread within certain groups of pupils?
• Are there any groups or cohorts of pupils that are over or underrepresented in any of the absence bands?
• Are the figures skewed by a small number of pupils?
• Is there a particular age group/year/class that has a significantly lower attendance rate than the others?
• Which groups of pupils should we be particularly concerned about and what can we do to improve their attendance?
• How much of our absence is authorised?

As well as the data-focused questions above, you should also ask your leaders questions about the strategies that are in place to promote attendance and tackle absence. Evaluating the data should feed into monitoring your strategy: find out more about this, including questions to ask, in our article on how to monitor your school/trust's attendance strategy. 

Consider the Ofsted criteria

Think about how your attendance data and procedures would fare in an inspection.

Attendance levels don't automatically correspond to specific Ofsted outcomes, but inspectors look at attendance as part of the 'behaviour and attitudes' judgement.

This judgement focuses on factors that contribute strongly to pupils' positive behaviour and attitudes – so, factors that give pupils the greatest possible opportunity to achieve positive outcomes. This includes:

• Having a strong focus on attendance and punctuality so that all pupils benefit from the education and experiences the school offers
• Having clear and effective behaviour and attendance policies with clearly defined consequences that are applied consistently and fairly by all staff

Inspectors will focus on:

• Overall absence and persistent absence rates for all pupils, and for different groups compared with national averages for all pupils
• The extent to which pupils with persistent and severe absence are improving their attendance over time and whether attendance is consistently low
• The school's analysis of attendance data and how it has fed into the school's approach to improving attendance
• School leaders' understanding of the causes of absence and whether a clear strategy is in place which takes these into account

However, inspectors also recognise the context of the pandemic. Attendance between March 2020 and March 2021 will not impact on inspectors' judgement of your school.

See paragraphs 312 and 315 to 319 of the School Inspection Handbook.

The behaviour and attitudes grade descriptors that mention attendance are:

This is set out in paragraphs 471 and 472 of the inspection handbook.