Attendance - Data Quality Statement

The Attendance (Return of Absences) collection is a biannual data collection from NSW government schools, excluding, Distance Education Centres, hospital schools, Intensive English Centres and Educational Training Units.  Key data items include number of school days open, number of student enrolments and total absence days by scholastic year, gender, term and Aboriginality. (Grade 12 Term 4 is excluded). 
 
NSW is required to comply with national reporting requirements for the publication of attendance data on the ACARA My School website.

Attendance Rate

Nationally, the attendance rate is defined as the number of actual full-time equivalent student days attended by full-time students in Years 1 to 10 in Semester 1 as a percentage of the total number of possible student-days attended in Semester 1, adjusted where necessary when K-12 and/or Semester 2 figures are provided. 

Attendance Level

Nationally, the attendance level is defined as the proportion of full-time students in Years 1-10 whose attendance rate in Semester 1 is greater than or equal to 90 per cent, adjusted where necessary when K-12 and/or Semester 2 figures are provided. 

Policy Change Impact on Attendance Rates and level 
 

• In 2010, the school leaving age was raised and impacted attendance rates for students particularly in Year 11 and 12. 

• From 2015 onward, approved extended family holidays were recorded as absences, which led to a fall in attendance rates. 

• The attendance level was introduced in 2018 in NSW government schools. This measure is more volatile than the attendance rate, as it is binary (that is, a student attending less than 90% of the time or a student attending 90% or more of the time). For most students, their attendance rate is concentrated around 90%. Therefore, a small shift in their attendance will likely mean changes in their attendance position to below, at, or above the 90% threshold, resulting in a larger variation in the attendance level. 

Collection Coverage 
 

• School level attendance data collection includes all scholastic years (Kindergarten to Year 12) and differs to publicly available data where only Years 1 to 10 are published annually. 

• Attendance data for schools for specific purposes (SSPs) was first collected in 2020. SSPs include Educational Training Units within Youth Justice Centres (formerly Juvenile Justice Centres), with data collected for all such centres except the Putland Education and Training Unit. 

• All schools with census enrolments are in scope, apart from Distance Education Centres, hospital schools and Intensive English Centres. 

Factors Impacting Notable Collection Periods 
 

• Attendance in 2019 was partly impacted by a bad flu season and Eid celebrations falling on weekdays. 

• While there were no COVID-19 lockdowns or learning from home periods in 2022, student attendance was impacted by a range of factors: Sick students staying at home until a negative COVID-19 test was returned, household members testing positive to COVID-19, the easing of COVID-19 border controls at the beginning of 2022 which allowed families to travel inter-state and overseas, NSW floods, and influenza outbreaks. 

• While there were no lockdowns or learning from home periods in Semester 1 2023, there was still a high prevalence of sick attendance codes as students were encouraged to stay home if they were even slightly unwell. Advice for families were still in place, recommending students and staff to stay home when sick and only returning to school when they were symptom free. 

• Due to system limitations, it was not possible to disaggregate unexplained and unjustified absences prior to Term 3 2019. Following the staggered rollout of the ebs (2014 to 2017), most unexplained absences were recorded as unjustified in the department’s data warehouse until September 2019. 

Collection
 

• Validated attendance data is collected in the Attendance (Return of Absences) collections each year: all of Semester 1 attendance data in July, and all Term 3 and weeks 1-5 of Term 4 in November. 

Break in Series 
 

• Semester 1 2020 attendance data is not provided because students were encouraged to learn from home for several weeks, which led to inconsistencies in the way attendance was being recorded at schools. 

• Semester 2 2021 attendance data is not provided due to an extended learning from home period in Term 3. The department did not have a formal Semester 2 attendance data collection in 2021 which resulted in a minimal level of validation for schools’ attendance data. 

• From 2014, CESE introduced additional anomaly checks to ensure data was complete and of a high quality. 

• Prior to 2018, school level attendance data was manually collected from schools. From 2018 onwards, student-level attendance data was available centrally for all schools. 

• Prior to 2018, NSW government schools could not report the proportion of students attending 90%+ due to system limitations. 

• From 2021, data was collected directly from attendance source systems. This removed the need for schools to export data and import their attendance data to the department’s centralized system (ebs: Central).  

• In 2018 NSW government schools implemented the national standards for student attendance data reporting. This resulted in a fall in attendance rates for most schools due to the inclusion of partial absences over 120 minutes (calculated as a proportion of a nominal 6-hour day) accounting for student mobility in the calculation. Data from 2018 is not directly comparable to previous years. 

• Semester 1 2020 is not comparable to previous years due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The NSW Government encouraged students to learn from home, where possible, for a seven-week period from 24 March to 22 May 2020. During this period, schools monitored engagement with learning to determine whether students were marked present. This changed the attendance measure.  

• 2021 data is not comparable to previous years due to: 

• Changes to calculations rules to align with the revised 2020 National Standards for student attendance data reporting: final week of Term 2 was included, treating partial absences over 120 minutes as a half-day absence (instead of their actual value, calculated as a proportion of a nominal 6-hour day), no rounding to determine whether a student’s attendance rate meets the 90% threshold for attendance level calculations (attendance level only).  

• The continued impact of COVID-19 where the NSW Government imposed lockdowns in certain areas of the state. 

• Changes in the way attendance data was transferred from third-party vendors into the department’s centralised data warehouse, which significantly improved data quality. 

In 2020, ACARA issued a revision to the National Standards for Student Attendance Data Reporting, resulting in changes to the counting rules for the Attendance (Return of Absences) collection.  

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• Student attendance rate by Aboriginality and year level (2012-2019, Semester 1 2021 - 2023)
• Student attendance rate by individual government school (2011-2023)