Guidance

Share your daily school attendance data

The information that schools must provide the Department for Education (DfE).

From:
Department for Education
Published
14 March 2022
Last updated
14 November 2024 — See all updates

Applies to England

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.

The purpose of this guidance is to explain:

  • how schools should share their daily attendance data with DfE
  • the data items required
  • the methods of submission

It also covers:

  • which schools this guidance applies to
  • how schools can ensure they meet the statutory duty
  • how schools, academy trusts and local authorities can access and use the data
  • how we protect and share the data

This guidance explains the Education (Information About Individual Pupils) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2024. The regulations require the ‘appropriate person’ of a relevant school to provide the required data items to the department on request.

This guidance serves as the request for these data items.

Statutory requirement

Sharing school attendance data is a statutory requirement on schools under the following legislation:

A statutory requirement:

  • means that schools do not need to obtain parental or pupil consent to the provision of information
  • ensures schools are protected from legal challenge that they are breaching a duty of confidence to pupils
  • helps to ensure that returns are completed by schools
  • means that all pupil data collection elements are mandatory unless specifically stated to be voluntary

The importance of sharing daily attendance data

Sharing daily attendance data not only ensures schools and academy trusts meet their statutory duty, but also:

  • helps schools, academy trusts, governing bodies and local authorities meet the new expectations set out in working together to improve school attendance guidance
  • requires no additional cost
  • will not add to a school or academy trust’s workload

Schools, their academy trusts and local authorities can access and analyse the data via the secure Monitor your school attendance tool.

This data:

  • gives schools, local authorities and academy trusts access to more up-to-date pupil-level attendance data
  • enables easy identification of pupils requiring support and facilitates greater working together
  • helps identify trends across pupil groups, schools, local areas, and nationally enables efforts and strategies to be targeted

Pupil attendance in schools data from national and local authorities is published on Explore Education Statistics every 2 weeks.

Who this guidance is for

This guidance applies to all:

  • schools maintained by a local authority
  • special schools not maintained by a local authority
  • academy schools
  • alternative provision academies

But it does not apply to nursery schools.

Schools required to share attendance data

We use the ‘School type’ listed on Get Information About Schools (GIAS) to identify the schools required to provide the information set out in this guidance.

They are:

  • academy alternative provision converter
  • academy alternative provision sponsor led
  • academy converter
  • academy special converter
  • academy special sponsor led
  • academy sponsor led
  • community school
  • community special school
  • foundation school
  • foundation special school
  • free schools’ alternative provision
  • free school
  • free school special
  • non-maintained special school
  • pupil referral unit (PRU)
  • studio school
  • university technical college (UTC)
  • voluntarily aided school
  • voluntary controlled school

The regulations do not apply to any other types of institutions, such as:

  • 16 to 19 academies
  • sixth form colleges
  • independent schools that are not academies – this includes schools listed as ‘other independent schools’ on GIAS

Data items included in the regulations  

Following the publication of this guidance, all relevant schools should ensure they share and continue to share the required data items.

Required data items for each pupil:

  • forename
  • middle name
  • surname
  • date of birth
  • sex
  • ethnicity
  • first language
  • unique pupil number (and former number, where necessary)
  • attendance code
  • admission date
  • leaving date (where available)
  • postcode
  • national curriculum year group
  • looked after child
  • previously looked after child
  • special educational needs (SEN) type and rank
  • education health and care plan (EHCP)
  • free school meals (FSM)

We’re collecting each of these data items for:

  • pupils in reception
  • all compulsory school-age pupils
  • pupils in years 12 and 13, if this is recorded in your management information system (MIS)

The data items listed below are not included in the regulations but will be collected on a voluntary basis:

  • child in need
  • child protection plan

Requirements for data sharing

Schools with management information system (MIS) suppliers

The easiest way to share attendance data is via Wonde.

Wonde has asked schools to agree to share attendance data via its portal. Once a school agrees, it will connect with the MIS to extract and securely transfer the data to DfE automatically each day. This will include any changes to the data from previous days.

To share data:

  1. Go to your Wonde portal and select DfE.
  2. Review the request to share data.
  3. Accept the request.

If you have any problems using Wonde’s secure portal, email [email protected].

There are no costs involved in sharing data via Wonde.

Continuous data sharing

A school is compliant with the duty to share information under the regulations when:

  • the school has and continues to have all the required information in its MIS
  • Wonde has continued permission to access that information at any time

Compatible MIS suppliers

Wonde can extract data from:

  • Arbor
  • Bromcom
  • Compass
  • Databridge
  • Engage
  • ET-AIMS
  • Facility
  • Integris
  • IRIS iSAMs
  • PupilAsset (Horizons)
  • SatchelOne
  • ScholarPack REST
  • SchoolBase
  • SchoolPod
  • SIMs
  • Teacher Centre
  • WCBS
  • WCBS Hub
  • WondeGeneric
  • XP-Trust

This list could be subject to change if new management information systems become available.

Schools without compatible MIS

The very small number of schools that do not use a compatible MIS can submit data to the department.

To meet the statutory duty, the required data items must be submitted every Friday by 11.59pm for the previous school week.

Data should be submitted for all weeks when there is at least one school session.

It needs to include data for:

  • a full school week (Monday to Friday)
  • all pupils in the school

Attendance must be recorded twice a day (morning and afternoon sessions).

To submit data each week:

  • use the standard Excel (.xlsx) template to record the required data items twice a day (morning and afternoon)
  • save a copy of the populated Excel template, as a comma-separated values (CSV) file
  • log in to a DfE secure portal using your DfE sign-in credentials to submit the data, for the relevant week

The DfE portal generates a unique submission reference number. This serves as confirmation and acknowledgment of the completed submission.  

If you are unable share data via Wonde and have not been contacted by DfE, send an email to: [email protected].

Resubmission of attendance data

We complete basic quality checks on each data submission. If data is missing or incorrect, we will contact you.

You may need to submit a new file to replace the full school week of data items for the relevant date.

Data protection and data sharing

The UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) provides certain safeguards regarding the use of personal data by organisations, including:

  • the department
  • local authorities
  • schools

The UK GDPR and DPA 2018 details the rights of those (known as) data subjects about whom data is held, such as:

  • pupils
  • parents

This includes (amongst other information that we are obliged to provide):

  • the right to know the types of data being processed
  • why data is being processed
  • who we will share the data with

For the purposes of data protection legislation, the terms ‘process’, ‘processed’ or ‘processing’ apply to any activity involving the personal data, such as:

  • collecting
  • storing
  • sharing
  • destroying

How this data will be used

All data we are collecting is subject to a privacy notice (PDF, 150 KB, 4 pages). No information that identifies a child will be shared publicly. We will use this data to identify national, regional and local trends, and patterns in school attendance.

 A data protection impact assessment (DPIA) (PDF, 241 KB, 21 pages) is available for this collection.

Further information

Get information about the Monitor your school attendance tool:

Updates to this page

Published 14 March 2022
Last updated 14 November 2024 + show all updates

  1. We updated the section 'Schools required to share attendance data' to clarify that the regulations do not apply to schools listed as ‘other independent schools' on Get information about schools.

  2. Updated the 'Data protection and data sharing' section to remove teachers from the 'data subjects about whom data is held' list.

  3. Updated information about mandatory attendance data sharing, effective from 19 August 2024.

  4. Added surname, forename and middle name(s) and their common basic data set (CBDS) identifiers to the list of data items included in the regulations.

  5. Added information about mandatory attendance data sharing, which begins in September 2024.

  6. Updated the list of MI systems.

  7. Updated the data protection impact assessment (DPIA).

  8. Updated 'How this data will be used' section with the latest versions of the 'privacy notice', 'data collection principles' and 'data protection impact assessment (DPIA)'.

  9. Information on accessing your school attendance data has been removed. A link has been added to a new page containing this information.

  10. Updated the final sentence in the section 'What data we need'. It has been changed from 'The data will be refreshed for codes changed within 7 days of registration' to 'The data will be refreshed for any codes you change after you start sharing data'.

  11. Updated the data protection information in the privacy notice in 'How this data will be used'.

  12. Added 'date of birth' to 'We collect the following data items'.

  13. Updated the list of data items in the ‘What data we need’ section. Added information on school identifiable level data in the ‘How this data will be used’ section. Also updated the ‘data protection impact assessment (DPIA)’, ‘privacy notice’ and ‘data collection principles’ documents to reflect that this collection is now business as usual. Sections 2 (a), 3 and 6 in the DPIA have been updated. The data is being shared with schools, trusts and local authorities, with aggregated attendance statistics being published.

  14. Information about when reports will be ready to view has been added under 'Accessing your school's attendance reports'.

  15. Updated information on accessing your school attendance reports including how get access to view your education data.

  16. First published.

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