Weekly Attendance analysis provides a far more timely and up-to-date picture of attendance compared to termly census-based reports, which can be up to two terms out of date. This analysis allows schools to identify patterns, trends, and emerging concerns much earlier, supporting more responsive intervention and decision-making.
Within the Weekly Attendance section of Analysis, the Summary page provides a high-level overview of the key headline indicators for Absence and Attendance:
Each indicator is displayed alongside comparative measures that compare your school to a higher level aggregation, such as National, your school in the previous year, and the previous week, as well as providing a breakdown by key pupil groups.
If you have questions about the availability or completeness of your weekly attendance data, please get in touch with your local authority directly.
Summary Analysis
Weekly Attendance Summary analysis is presented in the familiar Perspective Analysis style, providing easy-to-read and absorb highlights. Each card then includes a verbalisation of the descriptions.
You can select a value within a card to drill down into the underlying data. For example, clicking on the overall attendance value will display the raw data, showing the individual pupils that contribute to the calculation.
You can also spin the card by clicking View Detail to see a further breakdown.
The comparison group defaults to published national (the last set of nationally published full-year data), but you can make alternative selections through the comparators listed above, including emerging national figures for the current year based on aggregated data from all participating Local Authorities.
Trend Chart
As the name suggests, this will provide a trend of each week where data was imported. The chart will provide comparative lines for the selected scope in the previous year and the selected comparator for both the previous and current years.
Please note that in the first year, when your LA has only imported the end-of-year file for 2024/25, this will display as a single threshold line. Additionally, it will display the trend across weeks from the previous year.
Within the trends display, the overall value is the year-to-date (or last loaded data) figure. However, you can click on the trend line and see the results up to that selected point.
To calculate each week's sessions, we subtract the previously imported file's year to date sessions from the subsequent imported week's year to date values. This approach, rather than simply showing the year to date values each week, was chosen to provide a more dynamic view of the scope's data and to make weeks of high and low attendance more visible.
While further investigation takes place, each LA's half term weeks are being hidden from the chart. This will show a gap within the Scope (purple) line.
Yearly Trend
The yearly trend calculation compares the data from that specific week's file to the closest equivalent week last year. If there is no equivalent week for the previous year, the analysis will select the next best option. For example, where possible, we will compare week 9 to week 9, but if there is no week 9 for last year, we will select week 10.
Recent Change
The recent change calculation compares the latest academic week data to the year-to-date data from the most recent previously imported file. In practice, this is done by subtracting the previous imported year-to-date sessions from the latest imported week to provide the sessions for the intervening period. These sessions are then used to calculate the relevant attendance and absence indicators for that intervening period. These are then compared back to the most recent previous imported percentages to calculate the recent change gap.
Filters
Weekly Attendance leverages all of the information Perspective already holds on your pupils to provide a much richer potential for analysis than is currently available to Schools direct from the Department. This is alongside comparisons to emerging national results (aggregated from Local Authorities) and published national options.
This allows filtering of the attendance data analysis by a much wider variety of options than is possible in the source data.
Where filters are identical to other parts of the Analysis package, they are not described in as much detail:
- Time period - select one from Latest Week, Last Imported Week, Autumn Term, Spring Term, Summer Term, Autumn & Summer Terms, Full Academic Year
- Scope - select one from LA, School, School group, CLA, CIN, CPP, CINO or CPPO
- School Type - Multi-selection of school types
- School phase - Multi-selection of school phases
- Year Group - Multi-selection of NC Years from Reception to Year 11 or ALL.
- Pupil premium - select one from All, Disadvantaged True, Disadvantaged False, FSM6 True and FSM False
- Ethnicity - Multi-selection from either ALL or the list of DfE sub-category codes
- Language: - Multi-selection from either ALL or EAL: True, EAL; False, English, English Believed, Not Obtained, Other, Other Believed or Refused
- Sex: - Select one from ALL, male or female
- Special educational needs: - Select one from ALL, SEN: EHCP & Support, SEN: None, SEN: EHC Plan or SEN: Support
- Primary SEN Type: - Multi-selection from standardised primary need codes, including Down Syndrome
- Key absence groups: - select one from:
- All
- Persistent absentee (10%+)
- Not persistent absentee (<10%)
- Severely persistent absentee (50%+)
- Not severely persistent absentee (<50%)
- 5%-15% absence
- Free school meals: - select one from All, True or False
- Comparator: - select one from:
- National - emerging figures from aggregation of data loaded by LA)
- Published national - official DfE figures
- LA - only available when scope is set to School, School group, CLA, CIN, CPP, CINO or CPPO