The short answers
How do I improve my school's attendance?
Find the children whose attendance is slipping while there is still time to help, understand why before deciding what to do, and work with the family on support that is written down and reviewed. The DfE's statutory guidance, Working together to improve school attendance, sets this out as a sequence: expect good attendance, monitor it, listen and understand, facilitate support, formalise support, and only then enforce. Most of the improvement happens in the first four.
How can primary schools improve attendance?
The same sequence applies, and in a primary school the family is almost always the route to the child. Contact home the same morning a child is absent, tell a family their child's attendance before anybody else does, and check whether a pattern points at the school, such as one weekday or the afternoons, before deciding it is about the family.
What does the DfE expect schools to do about attendance?
Under Working together to improve school attendance, schools are expected to have an attendance policy, a senior leader responsible for attendance, to monitor attendance and analyse the data regularly to spot patterns early, and to work with families and other services to remove barriers. Legal intervention is for when support has not worked, has not been engaged with, or is not appropriate.
How do you show that attendance is improving?
Compare like with like. Set the school's figure against the same point last year and against the DfE's national average for the same phase, show which pupils have moved back above the school's target and stayed there, and show whether the gaps for pupils eligible for free school meals and pupils with SEND are closing. Ofsted's toolkit looks for attendance broadly in line with national averages or improving over time.
Support first, and in order
The DfE's guidance sets out six stages: expect, monitor, listen and understand, facilitate support, formalise support, and enforce. The order matters. A family that has been told the count, has been listened to, and has been offered something real has every reason to improve, and most do. What each stage asks of a school, and the seven practices that keep families away from the penalty notice threshold, are on the ten-week duty.
Seeing that it is working
Improvement is slow to see from inside a school, because the headline figure moves by fractions from one export to the next. These are the views that show progress while it is happening.
Who has come back up
A child who was below your target and has now been above it for three exports in a row has recovered, and that is worth knowing as much as who has slipped. It is also the child, and the family, to tell.
What moved since the last export
Improving and declining side by side, year group by year group, so the year that has turned a corner is as visible as the one that needs a conversation.
Whether the gaps are closing
Your pupils eligible for free school meals, with SEND and with English as an additional language, each against the same group nationally and in your local authority, from the DfE's own figures.
This year against last year, at the same point
Not against a finished year, which always looks better in the autumn, but against where the school was on the same date last year.
Who is heading for persistent absence, before they reach it
Above 90% now but falling, so the call home happens while it can still change the outcome rather than after the figure has been reported.
Who is getting close to the penalty notice threshold
Counted over the exact ten school weeks, so a family can be reached, and supported, long before a fine is ever discussed.
The national figures behind these comparisons, for every phase and pupil group, are on school attendance national averages.
Where this comes from
Reviewed on 23 August 2026. Attendance policy moves, so check the live pages rather than take our word for it.
See your own school's progress
adsum shows all of the above from the exports your MIS already produces: who has recovered, what moved, which gaps are closing against England, and who to reach next. It is built to celebrate what is going well as plainly as it shows what needs support.
Or ask us for a trial on your own school's data.