This article provides a comprehensive guide for schools to prepare for the school census, detailing necessary permissions, data verification steps, and updates required for student profiles. It emphasizes the importance of checking school details, identifying duplicate student profiles, and ensuring all necessary student information is accurately recorded before the census dry run.
Read time: 15 minutes
For links to other useful guides and webinars, click here.
Permissions
| Permission | Coverage |
|
School: Data Returns: Administer |
Permission to be able to access and run the School census |
|
School: General Admin: Administer |
Access and edit the data in the Data Quality Dashboard for students |
|
Student Profile: Admin: Administer All Students |
Add student funding or early years pupil premium eligibility |
|
Student Profile: In Care: Administer All Students |
Add in care notes for students |
|
Student Profile Language Abilities: Administer All Students |
Add language abilities |
|
Student: Consents: Administer |
Update YSSA |
If you don't have permission(s), you'll need to ask your school admin team to give you permission using these instructions.
Before Dry Run - Prepare Your Data
Before the Dry Run opens, you can start preparing for Census using these three key areas:
- Verify your recorded School Details, Childcare, and Weekly School Hours Open by navigating to School > School Details.
- Check for duplicate student profiles in the Suspected Duplicates section.
- Add and update basic details in the Students > Identity and Students > Demographics sections. Simply click a cell to add the data!
Preparing your school data
Verify your recorded School Details by navigating to School > School Details.
Make sure that your LA is filled in, Establishment Number, School telephone number and email address, Intake sex, School phase, School type, Governance type, Intake type, and URN all have information present (especially important to check if you have recently become an Academy).
Consolidate or remove any duplicate students
To identify potential duplicate students, go to School > Data > Data Quality Dashboard > Suspected Duplicates > Students.
Once identified, you can choose to merge or delete these duplicate students. Refer to this article for instructions on how to do this.
Useful Tips:
- If you know two students are duplicates but they are not being flagged, ensure that their names are identical.
- You cannot delete or merge a profile that has attendance marks. To do so, you must first delete the student's attendance marks by following these instructions.
Verify student data
To ensure that all students have entered information for important Census fields, navigate to School > Data > Data Quality Dashboard > Students.
This will display three sections where you can update and add information - Contact Details, Identity, and Demographics. Review each section to verify your student data.
Top Tip: You need the School: General Admin: Administer permission to access this area. If you don't have permission, ask your office team to grant it to you using these instructions.
Religion, country of birth, and nationality are not included in the census, so these fields are not mandatory.
Assign UPN - Ensure that all students have a UPN. If a student does not have a UPN in their profile, they will appear in the list (image below).
To generate a UPN for a student, use the bulk actions.
To assign a known UPN to a student, add this from the Identity section of their student profile.
Update Basic Details - Verify that you have entered important student information correctly.
To add or modify any of the information, simply click on the cell you want to edit.
A slide-over will appear, allowing you to input or update the appropriate details.
i.e. To add an Ethnicity source, select the students and then choose Bulk Set Ethnicity to specify the source.
For Early Years and Nursery years: Update Funded Hours - Clicking on this will direct you to a table that contains the required hours and funding information for Early Years and Nursery students in the School Census.
- You can find detailed instructions on how to fill in the information from the DfE here: Funded hours
- Our guidance provides instructions on how to fill in the information for students and includes details on hours at the setting, funded hours, extended or expanded hours, and 30-hour funding codes. You can find it here: Hours at setting, funded hours, extended hours, and 30-hour funding codes
You can add information in bulk, but you must individually add the 30-hour code by selecting each student.
Update National Tutoring Programme Hours - If you have registered a student as eligible for School Led Tutoring or National Tutoring Programme funding, you need to input the number of tuition hours they will receive. You can find instructions on how to do this here.
For students 11+: Update YSSA - If you have students whose information you are sharing with Connexions etc make sure that this is noted in the Youth Support Services Agreement section.
If you’re not requesting this information, you can mark your students as Unsought.
Additional Information to Check and Record
Please note that Pupil Premium is not directly output: Is Pupil Premium output in the census?
Alternative Provisions
Record which students have had Alternative Provision (AP) placements: Alternative Provision placement details
Exclusions
Mark Permanent Exclusions in review as Do not return in school census.
What should you do next?
After reviewing your site and completing any missing information according to the instructions above, you can start working on your census.
Before generating a dry run of your census, please go through our School Census Preparation Checklist. It will help you avoid common errors and address any queries that schools often encounter during the dry run.
Once the census dry run is available, you can run your dry run census and prepare it for submission. For information on when the dry run opens and to access the complete census guide, please visit: School Census help and guidance
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