Manage absences and lateness at your school
Absence management asks two questions, and only one of them is about counting. The first is mechanical: how many lessons, how many days, how much lateness, per pupil and per period. The second is legal and differs everywhere: at what point does an absence stop being a school matter and become something the school must report, and to whom? SchuleVernetzt handles the counting for you – absences and lateness recorded per pupil, per school year, totalled automatically, with incoming excuse notes reconciled and outstanding certificates tracked. The thresholds are yours to set, because the answer to the second question comes from the education law your school sits under, not from the software.
Coming soon
- GDPR-compliant
- Hosted in Germany
- Free for teachers
A product of SavePaper.work
Why schools manage absences digitally
Counted per pupil and school year
Every absence and every late arrival is assigned to the right pupil automatically and totalled across the school year – no tally marks in the register.
Excuses reconciled automatically
When an excuse note comes in, the matching absence is marked as excused automatically. Open and unexcused days stay visible at a glance.
Your thresholds, watched for you
Whatever threshold binds your school – a certificate after a set number of days, or a reporting duty at a set number of missed hours – you configure it once and the system flags the cases that reach it.
Reports at the push of a button
Absence totals per class or reporting period are ready any time – GDPR-compliant, hosted inside the EU and visible only to authorised staff.
Four steps to a clean absence record
Absences arise in lessons, are cleared up at the school office and end up on the report card – four steps that SchuleVernetzt holds together without a tally list.
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1
The absence arises
In their own lesson, the teacher marks attendance, lateness or absence. The entry is thereby tied straight away to a person, a subject and a time – with no collected list at the end of the year.
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2
The excuse note arrives
Parents report by app or in the browser, and the office records phone reports itself. Every excuse note looks for the matching missed lessons and marks them as settled automatically.
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3
Keep the open items visible
Whatever stays without an excuse appears in a list of its own, sorted by class, date and frequency. If an announced certificate is missing for an absence, or a case crosses a threshold you have configured, the system flags it by itself.
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4
Report cards and archive
At report time, excused and unexcused absent days per pupil are ready and can be exported. After that the year group stays archived until the retention period that applies to your school has expired.
Managing absences digitally vs. tally lists and folders
Managing absences in detail
Which unit does your reporting rule actually count?
Before choosing how to record absences, find out what your reporting duty counts, because school systems measure the same thing in incompatible units. In the Netherlands the unit is teaching time: a pupil who misses sixteen hours without a valid reason within four consecutive school weeks has to be reported to the municipality through DUO's digital verzuimloket, and the report is due without delay after the threshold is passed. In England the unit is the session, meaning half a school day: ten or more sessions of unauthorised absence within ten school weeks is the national threshold at which the local authority may issue a penalty notice, under the Department for Education's statutory guidance of August 2024. In Germany the duty runs through the school supervisory authority and the details are set by each federal state. A tally list that only counts whole days cannot answer any of the hour-based questions afterwards. SchuleVernetzt therefore counts late arrivals, single lessons and full days separately and totals them in parallel: per pupil, per subject, per reporting period and per school year. Because attendance hangs on the individual lesson, patterns also become visible that vanish in a day-by-day grid – regular absence in the first period, for example, or after the lunch break.
The reconciliation that saves the work
The real effort in absence management is not the counting but the matching: which excuse note belongs to which absent day, and which certificate is still missing? SchuleVernetzt lays both sides on top of each other. When a sick note or a written excuse arrives, the system looks for the affected lessons and marks them as excused. What stays open afterwards is the school office's actual worklist – short instead of pages long. If the school announces a certificate for a case, the absence stays marked as incomplete until the proof is there, and reminds by itself. Later corrections are possible and are logged, which matters wherever an absence record can end up as evidence in a formal procedure.
Retention, access and deletion
Absences are personal data, and medical certificates are health data on top of that. For schools in the EU and the UK that puts certificates into the special category of Article 9 GDPR; SchuleVernetzt supplies the processing agreement under Article 28 GDPR together with a procedural description, and processes both on servers inside the EU, in Germany. Readers outside that area work under different law – in the United States, education records fall under the federal FERPA rules rather than the GDPR – but the operational answer is the same everywhere. Access is limited to those who need it for the task: the class teacher for their class, the office for the excuse notes, the school leadership for the reports. Every access appears in the audit trail. How long absences have to be kept is set by the education law your school sits under and differs considerably, so the period is configured per school rather than assumed. Because year groups are stored separately, an expired year group can be deleted without touching current data.
Up and running in a few steps
Create your classes, assign teachers, set the thresholds that apply to you – done. From day one, absences, excuses and certificates come together in one place, with no training and no new hardware.
Frequently asked questions about absence management
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