Unauthorized absences are difficult for a school to control. By definition, they are absences that you can’t sanction, that still happen when you’ve had a word with parents about school time holidays, or even set fines. You may or may not have a problem, but what’s the overall trend for your school and what’s the proportion of authorised to unauthorised absences. If the rate is high but the trend is down, we must be doing something right, so let’s identify what we’re doing right and embed it further.

This graph is a part of the School Analytics template, and it shows really clearly if the trend for unauthorised absence (in red) is increasing, decreasing or staying the same. The graph also shows authorised absences (purple) with attendance (presences?) in pale blue (attendance will hopefully be well over 90% for your school so we zoom the graph to show just the top 94%). As with all out Power BI visualizations, you can filter by school (if you are a MAT), pupil premium, EAL, year group and so on.