Does Intervention attendance update lesson attendance?

You may have a student who is out of a lesson because they are in an intervention session that takes place at the same time.

Intervention attendance does not affect their attendance for the lesson they would have otherwise been in, as they are separate events. Students attending interventions are marked present in those sessions, but will also receive a mark for the lesson they miss, unless they are removed from that register explicitly. Teachers can see intervention schedules on the lesson dashboard, and planned absences can be noted without using attendance codes.

Why Lesson and Intervention attendance do not interact

For safeguarding reasons, the student can't be marked Present in a lesson they were absent and not physically in the classroom in front of the teacher.

• The student will be marked present in the Intervention.
• The student will be given an appropriate absence mark for the class.

Top Tip: Don't worry about statutory attendance - the best mark will be taken (present over absent).

Should we actively remove students in Interventions from lessons they will not attend?

The answer to this depends on your situation and needs, but we recommend fully removing students from lessons they are not set to attend. 

• For statutory attendance, the best mark will be taken for simultaneous events like these during your roll call, so you do not need to be concerned that this will be incorrectly reflected on your statutory returns.
• Furthermore, keeping a student on the lesson register offers the option to easily leave absence notes for teachers to see why the student is not present. 
• On the other hand, if you keep a student in a lesson register while they are also in an intervention, their marks for both events (i.e. both the present and absent marks) count towards their Lesson Attendance and other attendance statistics, so as not to skew this, completely removing the student instead.

Removing a student from a lesson (recommended)

To fully remove a student from a lesson they are unable to attend due to an intervention, you can add a Timetable Slot Exception. Please find our detailed guidance on this process here: Remove students from classes and fix clashes where students are enrolled into multiple lessons 

Keeping students in the Lesson register

When a student is scheduled to be in an intervention, and you have chosen to keep them in their original lesson, this will be displayed on the lesson dashboard so that teachers can tell which students will not be in their lesson. 

The register will also show that the student is out of the lesson, but you can add a planned absence without using an attendance code to pre-fill the register and add a note with more details about the reason for the absence.

When students have been absent from the lesson but are on-site, they will still appear on the Absentees By Date page. By adding the attendance note, any staff who uses this page to follow up on absences will see that the attendance notes show the student was in an intervention.