Every intervention is recorded against the pupil with its outcome measurable against subsequent attendance, producing the documented support trail that statutory attendance guidance expects.
The statutory picture
“Working together to improve school attendance” became statutory guidance in August 2024, alongside a national framework for penalty notices. The expectation is a support-first approach: schools work with families and, where needed, the local authority, escalating only when support has not worked. Schools also share attendance data with the DfE.
The practical requirement is a trail. What was noticed, when. What support was offered. What the family said. What happened next. A school that escalated without evidencing support is exposed; so is a school that offered support and cannot show it.
The categories that matter
| Category | Definition | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Persistent absence | Missing 10% or more of sessions | The main published measure; a pupil at 90% is missing roughly half a day a fortnight |
| Severe absence | Missing 50% or more of sessions | A group that grew substantially post-pandemic and is under specific national scrutiny |
| Group disaggregation | By SEND, EHCP, pupil premium, children with a social worker, young carers | Where the whole-school figure conceals the actual problem |
Thresholds are lagging indicators
Persistent absence is a category a pupil enters after the damage is done. By the time a pupil crosses 10%, the habit is established, the family conversation is harder, and the pupil has missed content that will show up in assessment two terms later.
The patterns that predict it are visible earlier and are not thresholds:
- A run of single-day absences on the same weekday.
- Drift from 97% to 92% over six weeks, still well inside “fine”.
- Selective absence — present in the morning, absent for one particular lesson.
- Punctuality deteriorating before attendance does.
- Attendance falling in the weeks after a behaviour incident or a change in family circumstances.
Attendance officers are generally excellent at acting on what they can see. The constraint is what surfaces. Edves detects these patterns and puts them in front of a person while the conversation is still easy.
What Edves provides
- Session-level attendance with statutory codes, taken quickly enough that teachers actually do it on time.
- Automatic persistent and severe absence flagging, disaggregated by any group the school defines.
- Emerging-pattern detection rather than threshold alerts.
- Same-day contact on unexplained absence by app, SMS, email or voice — see parent engagement.
- Intervention records attached to the pupil with outcome measurable against subsequent attendance.
- Documented support trail for local authority and penalty notice processes.
- Combined risk signals — attendance with assessment, behaviour and participation, because the pupils who disengage rarely do so in one dimension only.
Attendance and SEND
The attendance gap for pupils with SEND, and particularly pupils with an EHCP, is wider than most schools' whole-school figures suggest, and the reasons are frequently different — unmet need, anxiety, or provision that is not working rather than disengagement.
Treating those pupils with a generic attendance escalation process is both ineffective and, where absence relates to unmet need, potentially indefensible. Edves disaggregates attendance by SEND status and links to provision records, so the question “is this an attendance problem or a provision problem” can actually be asked. See inclusion.
Emotionally based school avoidance
A growing proportion of severe absence relates to anxiety rather than disaffection, and the standard escalation ladder actively makes it worse. Schools handling this well distinguish it early, record it distinctly, and apply a different pathway.
That requires the distinction to exist in the system rather than in a pastoral lead’s memory. Edves supports absence reason categorisation that separates these cases, so reporting does not lump them together and interventions are matched to cause.
What software does not do
It does not improve attendance. Attendance improves when someone contacts a family early, listens, and removes an obstacle. What the system does is make sure that person knows who to contact, this week rather than next term, and that what they did is recorded well enough to build on.