#REALTIMES SEEK TRACKER TRIAL#

It also follows calls from children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, for “live” attendance data to help identify between 80,000 and 100,000 children who are not on school rolls. It forms part of a raft of measures announced today to tackle rising absence rates, including new requirements for schools to publish attendance improvement plans.

#REALTIMES SEEK TRACKER TRIAL#

The DfE told leaders in an email today that it sees the trial “as the first step towards a more efficient approach to data collection that is less burdensome for schools”. It will then be automatically extracted from their management information systems, with “no daily action” by schools required. The trial will be run by edtech firm Wonde, which will ask for schools’ agreement to share daily pupil-level and attendance data with the DfE. If “big challenges” are seen in certain areas or groups of schools, the DfE wants schools, councils and academy trusts “to be able to use it and seek out support and understand what may be causing children to be absent from school”. The Department for Education will run the trial over the “coming months” to see whether daily attendance data can help the government “understand and manage” sector-wide trends. The new automated system may even replace other forms of attendance data collection if the trial is successful. The government has asked schools to sign up to a daily attendance tracker trial which will collect real-time data from their registers to help address absences more quickly.

Realtimes seek tracker