In March, the Department for Education launched a voluntary data collection trial, to automatically gather and share back daily attendance data from the schools and multi-academy trusts who complete its census.

Collecting and sharing this data will give schools, local authorities, and multi-academy trusts access to more timely pupil level attendance data without adding to workloads or costs.

This process captures data at UPN level, so it can be used to track an individual pupil’s attendance or be used to look at cohorts within areas and/or settings. The data will also be available to local authorities to inform targeted approaches to support the attendance of vulnerable groups, such as looked-after children or pupils with special educational needs.

The trial has now reached the end of its first phase – the sharing back of data with those areas and settings who signed up. So far, this includes 70% of eligible settings.

The trial is being delivered by Wonde, which is compatible with – and can extract data from – a number of management information systems used nationally.

You can sign up to join the trial here