Manage absences and lateness at your school

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. SchuleVernetzt records attendance per lesson. Its totals count days: per pupil the excused and unexcused absent days, the days with lateness and the absence rate over the recorded days, for the school year or any other period, per class and for the whole school. Beside the totals it shows the number of individual lessons each pupil has missed, excused and unexcused apart, in the class tables and in the CSV export, along with a pattern by lesson and weekday. It has no breakdown by subject and does not check a reporting threshold automatically: whether sixteen hours in four weeks or ten sessions in ten weeks have been reached, the school reads from the figures and applies its own rule.

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 days it covers show as excused in the register. 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.

What unauthorised absence means for families — from England's national penalty notice threshold to court — is explained in School absence fines.