Guidance
Monitor your school attendance: technical issues
Updated 19 December 2024
Applies to England
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monitor-your-school-attendance-user-guide/monitor-your-school-attendance-technical-issues
Active issues
| User Type | User Issue | Description/Impact | Advice |
|---|---|---|---|
| School, local authority, trust | Inaccurate attendance results (pupils with sessions recorded after their leaving date) | Some schools, their local authority and academy trust see incorrect attendance and absence results in the tool. This is a data calculation issue causing sessions recorded after a pupil’s leaving date to be included when calculating attendance results. We normally exclude these sessions. Review our user guide to understand how we calculate your results. Schools can check if this issue affects them by using the ‘Check your leaver data’ report to identify pupils with sessions recorded after their leaving date. | We are working to fix this issue by early 2025. To get accurate results for current pupils, you can exclude leavers from your results. Select ‘all current pupils’ using the ‘leavers’ filter. |
| School, local authority, trust | Routine maintenance – pupil characteristics filters for previous academic year data | Filters are currently turned off for: previous academic year report, year-to-date comparison report. | Due to be complete by early 2025 |
| School, local authority, trust | Routine maintenance – data visualisation reports 2023 to 2024 attendance data | Previous academic year data is unavailable in the data visualisation reports. | Due to be complete by early 2025 |
| School | Blank data in attendance reports | Schools see ‘blank’ in the attendance data dashboard. | Report this issue on the DfE and ESFA customer help portal |
| School | Custom codes | An issue with custom codes causing some schools to see ‘blank’ for all their stats in the dashboard. | We are working with MIS providers to identify schools using custom codes. We will contact affected schools directly once solutions are available. |
| Local authority, trust, school | Unknown in pupil characteristic filters | Users see ‘unknown’ option under some pupil characteristics filters. This can be due to a lack of pupil characteristics data in the MIS or data sharing permissions. | Schools should check pupil characteristics data is recorded for each pupil in their MIS. Empty yes or no fields will show in filters as unknown. To check your data sharing permissions, log in to your Wonde portal. |
| Local authority, trust | Missing schools | Being unable to see data from one of your schools can be caused by a change to establishment type, for example a school has a new URN due to academisation. | Report this issue on the DfE and ESFA customer help portal providing the old and new URN. Check the missing school is sharing data with DfE before raising a ticket. |
| Local authority, trust, school | Inconsistent year group names | Pupil level fields filter showing inconsistent values (For example, Year group: Y1, 1, Year 1, year1). | This does not impact the output of your data, it is a data load issue which is being investigated. |
| Local authority, trust, school | Students with no date of birth (DOB) | If a pupil does not have a date of birth listed, they may not be included in attendance reports when the compulsory school age filter is applied. You can view a list of pupils without a date of birth by selecting ‘no’ in the compulsory school age filter. | Report this issue on the DfE and ESFA customer help portal. |
Closed issues
| User Type | User Issue | Description/Impact | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| School | End-year leavers | An issue causing some leavers to remain in your data for the next academic year. | Closed |
| Local authority, trust, school | Duplicate pupils | An issue causing pupils to appear twice within school records. | Closed |
| Local authority, trust, school | Incorrect SEN support pupil number | An issue causing SEN support statuses to be counted incorrectly. | Closed |
| Local authority, trust, school | IDAMS registration issue | An issue for IDAMS users getting access to the View your education data (VYED) platform. | Closed |
| Local authority, trust, school | Blank sessions AM and PM | Attendance reports show missing sessions (this issue only affects sessions before 22 October 2022). | We are working on this issue. |
| Local authority, trust, school | ‘NULL’ data showing | Dashboards showing data expected as a ‘False’ value is showing in the data as ‘NULL’. | Report this issue on the DfE and ESFA customer help portal. |