Attendance Register

Names down, days across

A grid. Student names down the left, day columns across the top, a mark in each cell. Ten to thirty rows, ten to thirty-one columns, and a class or group name in the header.

Thirty-one columns covers a calendar month. Twenty covers a typical month of school days.

Use a consistent mark scheme

Decide before you start and write the key in a corner. A tick or slash for present, O for absent, L for late, and something distinct for authorised absence.

The distinction between authorised and unauthorised is the one that matters administratively — in England it is what a school is required to report and what triggers intervention thresholds — and a register that collapses the two into "absent" cannot answer the question later.

Mark it at the time

Not hours later, and certainly not on Friday afternoon.

A register completed retrospectively is a recollection rather than a record, and in a school it is a legal document besides. Somebody asks in three months whether a particular child was in on a particular morning: a mark made that morning answers it, and one made four days later does not.

Reading the grid sideways

This is what the layout gives you and a list of daily totals does not.

Read across a row and the pattern is visible: a child absent every Monday, or every afternoon, or in the fortnight before every holiday. Those patterns mean something quite different from the same number of days scattered randomly, and they are invisible in a total.

Read down a column and you see the day everybody was off, which usually has an explanation worth knowing.

Beyond school

Clubs and societies. Training courses where attendance is certified. Sports squads, where availability across a season decides selection. Volunteer rotas. Music and dance schools invoicing by attendance.

Anywhere, in short, that somebody will eventually ask who was there and when.

It holds personal data

A completed register is a list of named children or adults and where they were on given days. Store it accordingly, do not leave it on a desk in an open room, and dispose of it by shredding rather than in a recycling bin.

Related: the grade book for marks rather than presence.