The start of the school year saw the introduction of new statutory guidance for schools in relation to recording and managing attendance (and absence).
Briefly, this saw the introduction of some new absence codes for use in schools’ registers and changes to definition of some existing codes. We’ll unpack these as we go along.
Data
We use data for September 2023 and cambodia rcs data september 2024 collected from around 9,000 schools subscribing to FFT Attendance Tracker.
Attendance
Code “/” is used to denote a pupil is present in the morning and code “\” in the afternoon.
There was a slight increase in the percentage of sessions marked present in 2024, up from 94.1% to 94.2% in primary and from 89.7% to 90.0% in secondary.
In addition, there are other codes which count as attendance. These are shown for 2024 in the following chart.
Combined these additional codes pushed up attendance in primary schools by 1.4 percentage points (to 95.6%) and in secondary schools by 3.2 percentage points (to 93.2%).
Code K was introduced for 2024/25. This is used when a pupil is attending education provision arranged by the local authority. This code was rarely used in September. 0.01% of primary sessions and 0.05% of secondary sessions were marked as K.
By far the most common of these codes is L: Late before registers closed. The guidance on the use of this code was tightened this year, with a 30 minute limit on keeping registers open imposed.