This article is brought to you by Slough Borough Council's Early Years team, on behalf of the Department for Education, for the attention of all Early Years settings.
Now available in the view your education data system (VYED), the new Monitor Your School Attendance data tool displays your school's attendance as a colour-coded heat map. It shows information across the current and previous academic year, so you can spot cohort trends at a glance, highlighting attendance highs, absence hotspots, and patterns over time.
This tool can help you make quicker decisions and take earlier actions to tackle occasional absence. Users of the Monitor Your Attendance service will also receive an email with more detail.
This data can be used to enhance your current support offer to your families as well as with the other resources being shared today to inform your strategies on engaging with parents and families.
- Explore your attendance patterns: As part of the 'View your attendance data', this new data tool - a visual heatmap across the year - helps to spot patterns in your own data at a glance
- An attendance research report: setting out the national picture on some common predictable absence patterns
- An updated attendance toolkit for schools: with a new chapter (8) to help you understand what practical yet proportionate actions you can take
A guide on communicating with parents about attendance: offering ready‑made evidence-based resources, such as animations, an NHS poster on illness decisions and useful templates