What attendance mark to use when a student is present in school but absent from their lesson

If a student has not attended their normal lesson they are required to be in (are truanting), but are present on school grounds, you can use Ad Hoc Interventions

Top Tip: You can also use this feature if you know that a student is out of class because they are with another teacher off-timetable (such as a time out, or a one to one session).

How should you record this?

On page 10 of the School Attendance Guide, the DfE states that 'Pupils must not be marked present if they were not in school during registration.' It also refers to which absence codes to use when 'pupils are not present in school'.

You should, therefore, mark them as Present for registration (statutory roll call) when the student is present in school, regardless of whether they are in the class they are supposed to be in or not.

You can add a note to the student's attendance mark to denote they were absent from the Bulk Edit Marks pages.

It isn't possible to create your own attendance marks, but you can see more about attendance codes here: Attendance codes and how they count towards statutory attendance

Recording the student's attendance

Lessons that contribute towards statutory attendance

For statutory attendance purposes, the student was on site. Because they were present on site, they need to be given a present statutory roll call mark. To do this, we recommend adding an Ad Hoc Intervention.

Make sure this Ad Hoc Intervention overlaps with your roll call times so that the present mark taken for the Ad Hoc Intervention pulls through as the student's statutory roll call mark. You can see more information here: Roll Call times

Because the student was not in the lesson, they should be marked as absent for the lesson. You'll need to select the appropriate absence code for a teacher to mark them with in the register (most likely N).

Other lessons

For lessons that do not overlap with your statutory roll call, your school should agree on a process for recording students. We would still recommend following the same process as above, as this enables you to record where the student actually is for safeguarding purposes.