[sims] Is there an official Attendance Summary calculation?

[techyphil]

Good evening all,

 

I've always wondered if there is an official calculation to work out attendance summary data? For example, I'm not entire sure how SIMS calculates the % attendance for the entire school. I've tried to manually calculate this in the past and then compared it with the summary data SIMS reports and it's a little off.

 

We now have Go4Schools and that displays a summary but it also states underneath the figures

 

"* Please note - the attendance statistics include school leavers who are not included in the on roll count."

 

So does SIMS also include leavers into the overall cumulative percentage attendance figures? Is there an official calculation? Aaaargh!! There's no transparency! Also, sixth form attendance is not a legal requirement, we take it anyway for fire regs and safe guarding etc but are they included in the whole school summary? Go 4 Schools show a % attendance by year and an overall, which presumably includes years 12 + 13. We're only interested in years 7-11. Is it the end of the world to take years 7,8,9,10 & 11 overall percentages and get the average of them?

 

This is just a random rant, it's not the end of the world. If someone has discovered the official calculation for these summaries, please let me know.

*rant over*

[oldtimer]

SIMS Attendance reports work on the principle of including anyone who was on roll for at least one session for the time frame you are reporting on. I don't know if there is an 'official' summary but each census pulls data for pupils on the same basis.

If you do it based on an on roll date, you could get a different result every time you ran the report for the same date range.

 

If you use the Group Analysis by Attendance Category report, you can also add a date of birth range filter to exclude 12 and 13 if you wish.

[techyphil]

Thank you oldtimer. I'll look at the Group Analysis report.

[bobsmith]

From memory the official DfE calculation is total number of sessions present divided by total number of sessions possible.

 

It's not an average of each individual students % attendance or anything that fancy.

[oldtimer]

It is the total Present codes plus Total Approved Educational Activity codes divided by the total possible sessions (x 100). You can't average individual students % attendance as this is mathematically incorrect.

[techyphil]

Thank you EduGeek,

 

That's helped me greatly and hopefully others in future!