It covers overall attendance, persistent and severe absence including for specific pupil groups, the intervention record behind those figures, behaviour incidents and suspensions, and whether the school’s behaviour culture is consistently applied.
Why combining them makes sense
Attendance and behaviour were separate concerns on paper and the same concern in practice. A pupil whose attendance is deteriorating is very often a pupil whose behaviour record is also changing, and the pastoral team dealing with one is dealing with the other. Grading them together reflects how schools actually work.
The attendance picture Ofsted looks for
- Overall attendance against national and similar-school comparisons.
- Persistent absence — pupils missing 10% or more of sessions.
- Severe absence — pupils missing 50% or more, a group that has grown substantially since the pandemic and is under specific national scrutiny.
- Disaggregation by group — disadvantaged pupils, pupils with SEND, pupils with an EHCP, young carers, children with a social worker.
- The intervention record — what the school did, when, and whether attendance improved afterwards.
The fourth and fifth points are where most of the evidence gap sits. A whole-school attendance figure is easy. Attendance for pupils with an EHCP, with the intervention history attached, usually is not.
Statutory attendance duties
“Working together to improve school attendance” became statutory guidance in August 2024, alongside a national framework for penalty notices. Schools are expected to work with families and the local authority through a support-first approach, escalating only where support has not worked, and to share attendance data with the DfE.
The practical requirement is a documented trail: what was noticed, what support was offered, what response there was, and what happened next. A school that escalated without evidencing support is in a weak position; so is a school that offered support and cannot show it.
The three-day rule of thumb
The single highest-value change most schools can make is reducing the time between an attendance pattern emerging and someone contacting the family. Not the first unexplained absence — the third, or the pattern of Monday absences, or the drift from 96% to 91% over six weeks.
That requires the pattern to be detected automatically rather than noticed. Most attendance officers are excellent at acting on what they see; the constraint is what surfaces in front of them.
Edves flags emerging patterns and combines attendance with assessment and pastoral signals into an early indicator, so contact happens while the habit is still forming. See attendance.
Behaviour
- Incident recording that is consistent enough to be analysed, which means a shared taxonomy rather than free text.
- Distribution of sanctions across groups — the suspension gap for pupils with SEND and disadvantaged pupils is a national pattern, and an inspector will look for whether the school knows its own.
- Consistency between staff. Where one teacher issues five times the sanctions of a colleague teaching the same cohort, that is a professional development question, and it is visible in data long before it is visible in a learning walk.
- Repeat patterns — the small number of pupils generating a large share of incidents, and what is being done for them rather than to them.
- Positive recognition alongside sanction. A behaviour system that only records the negative gives leaders half a picture and families a purely negative relationship with the school.
Mobile phones
Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, published on 7 July 2026 and in force from 1 September 2026, moves toward mobile phone-free schools as the default position. Schools working to the 2025 edition until 31 August 2026 should check the changed expectations before the autumn term. Behaviour policies, and the recording behind them, will need to reflect whatever position the school adopts. See KCSIE and safeguarding.
How Edves supports this area
- Attendance recorded at session level with persistent and severe absence flagged automatically, disaggregated by any group the school defines.
- Emerging-pattern detection rather than threshold reporting, so intervention starts earlier.
- Intervention records attached to the pupil, with the outcome measurable against subsequent attendance.
- Same-day family contact by app, SMS, email or voice — see parent engagement.
- Behaviour incidents on a shared taxonomy, with distribution analysis by pupil group and by staff member.
- Positive and negative recognition tracked together, including the ratio of positive to negative contact per family.