School attendance register

The rule: the 2024 Regulations and the register requirements

School registers are governed by the School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024, which “come into force on 19th August 2024” and replaced the 2006 Regulations. They “apply only in relation to schools in England”: maintained schools, academies and independent schools alike. Wales has its own pupil registration regulations.

Regulation 5 puts the duty on the proprietor: “(1) The proprietor of a school must ensure that an admission register is kept. (2) The proprietor of a school must ensure that an attendance register is kept unless all the pupils at the school are boarders. (3) The proprietor of a school must ensure that a register kept under paragraph (1) or (2) is kept electronically and that a back-up copy of that register is made at least once a month in the form of an electronic or printed copy.” A paper register book is not lawful for a school in England; printed copies serve only as back-ups.

Alongside the Regulations sits the Department for Education's Working together to improve school attendance, statutory since 19 August 2024 and updated on 9 July 2026 “with technical clarifications”. Paragraph 1: “This guidance is statutory, and schools, trusts, governing bodies, and local authorities must have regard to it as part of their efforts to maintain high levels of school attendance.” The July 2026 version gives “Greater clarity on expectations for schools' day-to-day practice, including taking the register at the same time for all pupils”, and on “when specific codes (e.g. Q, D, Y6, U) should be applied.”

Paragraph 35 says what the registers are: “Registers are legal records and all schools must preserve every entry in the attendance or admission register for 6 years from the date the data was entered.” Paragraph 34 adds that “Schools are expected to use an electronic management information system to keep their attendance and admission registers”, which in practice is where the registers live.

The admission register: who is on the school roll

The admission register is the school roll. Under regulation 8, the proprietor must ensure “that the name of each pupil at the school is entered in the school's admission register on the pupil's starting day, before or at the beginning of the first school session on that day.” Regulation 8(2) lists the personal details each entry holds:

• “(a) full name; (b) name that the pupil uses at school; (c) sex; (d) address”
• “(e) the full name and address of each of the pupil's parents”
• “(f) which of the pupil's parents, if any, the pupil normally lives with and at least one telephone number that each such parent can be contacted with in an emergency”
• “(g) day, month and year of the pupil's birth; (h) day, month and year of the pupil's starting day at the school”
• “(i) name and address of the last school the pupil attended, if any.”

Regulation 8 also covers further details: an address where a parent says the pupil will normally live in future, another school the pupil is or will be attending, and, in a school with boarders, whether each pupil of compulsory school age is a boarder or a day pupil. Regulation 8(7) requires changes to be entered “as soon as reasonably possible”, so keep the entries current: an out-of-date emergency number or a missing previous school in the admission register is a child protection gap as well as a breach.

A pupil's name may be deleted only on one of the grounds in regulation 9, and the deletion is itself an entry the register keeps. The deletion return in section 05 tells the local authority each time a pupil leaves the roll, so that a child who leaves one school's register is not lost between schools.

Taking the attendance register

Regulation 10(1) sets the timing: the proprietor must ensure that, “at the beginning of each morning session and once during each afternoon session, the attendance of each registered pupil who is not a boarder is recorded in the school's attendance register”. The guidance goes one step further at paragraph 32: schools “must take the attendance register at the start of each morning session and once during each afternoon session of every school day, at the same time for all registered pupils.” The words “at the same time for all registered pupils” are the July 2026 guidance's expectation; the Regulations do not contain them.

Every pupil on the admission register gets a code every session. Paragraph 291: “On each occasion the register is taken, the appropriate national attendance and absence code must be entered for every pupil (of both compulsory and non-compulsory school age) whose name is listed in the admission register at the time (with the exception of a pupil who is a boarder).” And paragraph 297: “Pupils must not be recorded as present if they are not in school during registration.”

Lateness has a limit, but it is in the guidance, not the Regulations. Paragraph 42 asks schools to “set out in their attendance policy the length of time the register will be open, after which a pupil will be recorded as absent. This should be the same for every session and not longer than 30 minutes.” A pupil who arrives while the register is open is L. One who arrives after it closes is recorded as absent for that session even though the pupil is in school: with the code for the reason, such as M for a medical appointment, where that is established, and otherwise U, an unauthorised absence (regulation 10(8)).

Paragraph 42 also asks schools to “Regularly inform parents about their child's attendance and absence levels. Schools should avoid headline percentages and instead make this understandable for parents (e.g. the amount of time missed and the impact on the pupil's learning).” The 10% persistent absence measure is a statistical measure in the guidance (paragraph 134), not a legal threshold in the Regulations.

The attendance codes, and the five-school-day rule for N

Regulation 10 sets the national codes in three tables. Every school uses the same codes, which is what lets the local authority and the Department read every register the same way. In summary:

• Table 1, present. / for present in the morning, \ for present in the afternoon, and L where the pupil “is absent from the school when the attendance register begins to be taken but attends before the taking of the register has ended.”
• Table 2, attending an approved place other than the school. K, V, P, W and B, for education arranged elsewhere, such as alternative provision, an educational visit, a sporting activity, work experience or another approved educational activity. The guidance classifies them for statistical purposes as attending an approved educational activity, not as absence.
• Table 3, absence. Leave of absence codes (including M for a medical or dental appointment and C2 for an agreed part-time timetable), other authorised reasons (including I where the pupil “is unable to attend because of sickness”), codes Y1 to Y3 and Y5 to Y7 where the pupil cannot attend for unavoidable reasons, and the unauthorised codes G (“absent without leave for the purpose of a holiday”), N and O. U, for a late arrival after the register has closed, comes from regulation 10(8) rather than the tables, and Y4 from regulation 10(10) (below).

The full wording of every code is in regulation 10's tables, and that is the text to train staff on. Two rules decide hard cases. Paragraph 295 of the guidance: “where the criteria for both a code in Table 2 and a code in Table 3 in the regulations are met, the code in Table 2 must be used.” And under regulation 10(10), when a session is cancelled, Y4 is entered for each pupil “as if it were a record of each pupil's attendance at the time when the session was due to take place.” For codes B, K and Y7, the school also records the nature of the activity or circumstance.

Code N means “The circumstances of the pupil's absence have not yet been established.” It is temporary. Regulation 10(7) requires the proprietor to ensure “that reasonable steps are taken to establish the circumstances of the pupil's absence and that the register is amended within five school days”. If the circumstances are established, N becomes the right code; if the pupil arrived after the register closed but before the session ended and nothing else applies, N becomes U; and “if the circumstances have not been established, the code N is to be replaced with the code O.” The guidance's summary at paragraph 42, “no later than 5 working days after the session”, is looser than the Regulation and the guidance's own paragraph 408 (“no more than 5 school days after the session”); follow five school days.

Schools are not expected to routinely ask for medical evidence for illness. Paragraph 374 of the guidance says schools “should not have blanket rules requiring this”, but “may request reasonable evidence where they have genuine and reasonable doubt about the authenticity of the illness, or when they are seeking to support pupils with prolonged or repeated patterns of illness.”

Leave of absence is the other judgement. Regulation 11 sets the circumstances in which leave may be granted. Under paragraph 36 of the guidance, maintained schools and non-maintained special schools must restrict leave to those circumstances, and academies and independent schools are expected to. A request for term-time holiday that is refused and taken anyway is recorded as G.

Amendments, retention, access and returns

Amendments. Regulation 6(1) requires that whenever an entry in either register is amended, the register contains “(a) the original entry; (b) the amended entry; (c) the reason for the amendment; (d) the date on which the amendment was made; and (e) the name of the person who made the amendment.” Any printed copy must carry the same information. The guidance limits when the attendance register should change at all: “As the attendance register is a record of the pupil's presence at the time it was taken, this register should only routinely be amended where the reason for absence cannot be established at the time it is taken and it is subsequently necessary to correct the entry.”

Retention. Regulation 7: “(a) every entry in the school's admission and attendance register is preserved for six years beginning with the day on which the entry was made; and (b) every back-up copy of the register made in accordance with regulation 5(3) is preserved for six years after the end of the school year that it relates to.” Six years runs from each entry, so an amendment or a deletion starts its own six years. Older pages that say three years describe the revoked 2006 Regulations; the pupil's 25th birthday is the period for a different record, a secondary school's pupil file, which our guide to record keeping in schools covers with the school's other records.

Access. Under regulation 12, the registers and their back-ups must be available for inspection during school hours, and a “relevant office-holder” may examine them and take extracts: “(i) the Secretary of State; (ii) His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Education, Children's Services and Skills; (iii) an officer of the local authority who is authorised for the purpose.”

Returns to the local authority. Regulation 13 requires four kinds:

• New pupil return, by the end of the fifth day after a pupil's name is entered in the admission register, “giving all the information about the pupil that is entered in the admission register”. It is not needed for pupils joining the most junior class on the first day of the school year, unless the local authority asks.
• Deletion return, when a pupil's name is deleted. It is not needed for pupils in the most senior class deleted at or after the end of the final term, unless the local authority asks.
• Attendance return, naming pupils of compulsory school age who fail to attend regularly or have been absent for a continuous period of at least ten school days recorded only with G, N, O or U. The interval is agreed with the local authority; paragraph 48 of the guidance says it “should be no less frequently than once per calendar month.”
• Sickness return, as soon as possible, for a pupil of compulsory school age recorded with code I where the proprietor has reasonable grounds to believe the pupil will be unable to attend because of sickness for at least 15 consecutive school days, or for a total of at least 15 school days in the school year. One return covers the same continuous period of absence.

State-funded schools have one more duty. Paragraph 51: “State funded schools must also provide specific pupil information on request to the Secretary of State”, which in practice means daily attendance data from the management information system. Independent schools, nursery schools, city technology colleges and city colleges for the technology of the arts are excluded. Schools that share their data get the View Your Education Data tool to monitor attendance.

The reason behind the code

The register is precise. The reasons behind it rarely are. At 08:40 a parent texts the class teacher that their son has a temperature. The attendance officer gets a message on her own phone from a parent she knows, saying a funeral will take the family to Manchester for two days. A voicemail is left on the office line and nobody writes it down. By the afternoon session the pupil is still N, and the code that replaces it depends on what the school was told, by whom and when.

Regulation 6 requires the reason for each amendment to be recorded in the register. The reason is only as good as the evidence behind it, and when an N becomes an I or an M, the evidence is often a message. If it lives on a teacher's personal phone, the school cannot show why the code changed when the local authority, an Ofsted inspector or a parent disputing a penalty notice asks.

That is a channel question. ComplyChat is one answer: a messaging channel the school owns, which parents join with a verified mobile number and staff use on any phone, where everyone added is told the channel is on the record. Messages are recorded as they are sent and, on paid plans, file into the school's own Microsoft 365 once its tenant is connected, under the school's own retention rules. Free is a permanent personal tier for up to 25 staff in one private group, with direct messages, three calendar months of recent history and no Microsoft 365 archive, so it cannot hold six years of evidence behind register amendments.

It is not a register and not a management information system. It does not take attendance, assign codes or make local authority returns, and the register itself must stay in the school's MIS. A phone call to the office still needs a note.

A question for the next leadership meeting: pick five amendments from last half term where N became another code, and ask where the message that justified each one is now, and who could produce it.

Questions people ask

Is a school attendance register a legal document?

Yes: in England the admission and attendance registers are required by the School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024, and the Department for Education's Working together to improve school attendance (July 2026) calls them “legal records”, with every entry preserved for six years.

How to make a school attendance register?

A school in England must keep its admission and attendance registers electronically and back them up at least once a month (regulation 5(3)); in practice the register lives in the school's management information system, as the DfE expects. A paper register book cannot be a school's register. The attendance register records each pupil at the start of the morning session and once in the afternoon session, using the national codes in regulation 10.

What does an attendance register look like?

Each session's entry is a single national code per pupil: / for present in the morning, \ for present in the afternoon, L for late before the register closed, and letters such as I (illness), M (medical appointment), G (unauthorised holiday) and N (reason not yet established) for absence, set out in regulation 10's three tables.

How do you find out your school attendance?

Parents should be told regularly: the July 2026 guidance expects schools to inform parents about their child's attendance and absence levels in understandable terms, avoiding headline percentages. State-funded schools that share data from their management information system with the DfE get the View Your Education Data tool, which “allows schools to monitor pupil level attendance”; it is a tool for the school, not for families, so a parent or pupil asks the school.

How long should attendance registers be kept?

Every entry in a school's admission and attendance registers must be preserved for six years beginning with the day the entry was made, and every back-up copy for six years after the end of the school year it relates to (regulation 7 of the 2024 Regulations).

Official guidance and your next step

The law is the School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024, especially regulations 5 to 13. The statutory guidance is the Department for Education's Working together to improve school attendance, July 2026 (the July 2026 PDF carries the paragraph numbers used here). Check that staff are working from the latest version: copies of the previous version of the guidance, and of the revoked 2006 Regulations, still circulate. Quotations are from those pages as published on 8 October 2026.

This guide is a summary for schools in England, not legal advice. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own registration rules, and penalty notices and prosecutions for non-attendance are outside its scope.

Then do one thing: ask your data manager for the register's amendment report for one week and check that every changed entry shows the original code, the new code, the reason, the date and who made it.