Whole School Approaches

In line with The Education (Information About Individual Pupils) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2024 and the requirements of 'Working Together to Improve School Attendance', all schools are now legally required to share information from their registers with the Department for Education and the local authority.  

Sharing data with the DfE 

From the start of the 2024 to 2025 academic year, schools have a duty to provide the information in this guidance to the Department for Education (DfE) on request.  It is important that all schools ensure that they have completed this process and for those schools who have not, further guidance on how to share your data is available via this link: Share your daily school attendance data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) 

Once you are sharing data with the DfE you will have access to a range of tools that will support you to analyse your data. The DfE has published guidance for schools, academy trusts and local authorities on using the monitor your school attendance tool: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monitor-your-school-attendance-user-guide/monitor-your-school-attendance-user-guide 

Sharing data with the LA 

Further, to facilitate timely collaborative working across partners, all schools are also required to share information from their registers with the local authority. As a minimum this includes:  

• New Pupil and Deletion returns: notifying the local authority when a pupil's name is added to or deleted from the school admission register outside of standard transition times. For full details see paragraphs 211 and 219 of the statutory guidance. Schools currently fulfil this requirement via completion of a Deletion Return form and New Pupil Return forms.  
• Attendance returns: providing the local authority with the names and addresses of all pupils of compulsory school age who fail to attend school regularly or have been absent for a continuous period of ten school days where their absence has been recorded with codes statistically classified as unauthorised (G, N, O, and/or U). 
• Sickness returns: providing the local authority with the full name and address of all pupils of compulsory school age who have been recorded with code I (illness) and who the school has reasonable grounds to believe will miss 15 days consecutively or cumulatively one or more of the because of sickness. 

Local authorities must agree the frequency that attendance returns are to be provided with all schools in their area. This should be no less frequently than once per calendar month. We want to reduce the administrative burden placed on schools as well as support them to meet with national requirements. As a result, we need schools to engage with both our local attendance data arrangements as well as the DfE collection of attendance data. This is because the DfE does not currently provide the facility to export data relating to sessional attendance codes that are required for the purpose of the sickness and attendance returns. As the DfE systems develop, we envisage that we will be able to cease the local collection of data and are providing feedback on proposed future development of the national system. Engaging with both systems simultaneously will not add to schools workloads nor compromise information security.