Every state school in England will now share their daily attendance registers across the education sector - including with the department for education, councils, and trusts in the next stage of the government drive to reduce pupil absence in school.

The sharing of daily school registers will form a new world-leading attendance data set that will help schools spot and support children displaying worrying trends of persistent absence or those in danger of becoming missing in education.

Schools, trusts and councils will be able to access this data via an interactive secure data dashboard maintained by the department for education. This will allow them easy use of the data to not only spot pupils in need of support but also to understand how their attendance position compares locally and nationally so they can look at where they might need to drive improvements.  

These reforms are the next phase in the government's plan to improve attendance following the pandemic which has seen a worldwide rise in absence and persistent absence driven by broken habits of attendance, and new and exacerbated barriers like mental ill health.