Attendance Resources

Are you stepping into the role of Attendance Lead but feeling unsure where to begin or how to get a grip on everything at once? Firstly, congratulations! And secondly, you're in exactly the right place – this free Honeyguide checklist is here to support your thinking from the very first day.

As an Attendance Lead, you're responsible for one of the most complex and data-driven challenges in school leadership – one that cuts across safeguarding, SEND, pastoral care, family engagement and school improvement all at the same time. That can feel like a lot, especially at the start! This checklist breaks it down into clear, manageable tasks across your first few weeks, your first half-term and your first full term, so you can approach the role with confidence and clarity.

Whether you're a newly appointed Attendance Lead or Attendance Champion, stepping up from a pastoral or admin role, or taking over from a previous postholder mid-year, this checklist will help you hit the ground running. Ideal for new Attendance Leads, Attendance Champions, Senior Attendance Champions and anyone with combined attendance and pastoral responsibilities.

Updated for 2026 in line with KCSIE and the Ofsted Framework

Designed for headteachers, deputy heads and attendance leads, this ready-made template gives you a clear, structured starting point for reporting attendance data and strategy to your governing board, without having to build a report from scratch.

You'll get:

☑️ Attendance Report to Governors Template – a comprehensive, 9-page editable Word document covering:

• whole-school attendance data
• attendance by pupil group and year group
• year-on-year comparisons
• session-by-session analysis
• CME and alternative provision tracking
• attendance improvement strategies
• multi-agency partnership work
• known barriers to attendance
• a strengths and areas for development evaluation, including a dedicated section for governor questions and challenges

All sections are fully editable so you can adapt the template to your school's context and reporting cycle.

Ideal for headteachers, deputy heads, attendance leads and attendance champions preparing termly or annual reports to governors.

👉 Looking for more governor report templates? This template and others are part of our Reports to Governors Template Bundle

🔒 New for 2026 and fully aligned to the Ofsted School Inspection Toolkit 2025

Gathering meaningful feedback on attendance and behaviour from pupils, parents and staff takes more than sending out a form. It requires careful planning, well-designed questions, a structured approach to analysis and a clear process for sharing findings back with your school community.

This pack gives you everything you need to plan, administer, analyse and act on stakeholder feedback about attendance and behaviour, and because the core survey templates come pre-populated with carefully considered questions, you can move from planning to distribution with minimal preparation time.

You'll get:

☑️ Three ready-to-use survey templates covering pupils (two versions for different age/ability groups), parents and carers, and staff – each ready-made with closed and open questions aligned to the 2025 Ofsted School Inspection Toolkit

☑️ A question and statement bank with additional prompts across all three stakeholder groups, so you can adapt or extend the surveys to suit your school's context

☑️ A survey analysis template with structured tables for tallying responses, identifying themes and triangulating findings across all three groups

☑️ A pre-survey checklist to help you think through the logistics before you launch and survey letter templates – ready-made notification and feedback letters for parents and staff

☑️ Comprehensive guidance on planning, administering, analysing and sharing survey findings, including how to handle difficult results and a free worked example that helps you learn how to effectively analyse and triangulate survey data

All documents are fully editable so you can adapt them for your school's specific context.