Attendance Data Services
This is the main index page for attendance data. From here you can access data on attendance and analysis based on the data.
Page contents:
Release date for termly attendance data
The expected date for the next release of attendance reports and data is shown in the table below.
| Term | Next release |
|---|---|
| Term 2, 2026 | 27 August 2026 |
Key findings: Data, statistics and publications
Statistics
The Attendance page presents established measures used to monitor schooling attendance. Data is available as simple spreadsheets as well as summary indicator reports. The Daily Attendance page contains an interactive dashboard with the current daily attendance rates.
Attendance[webpage]
Daily attendance[webpage]
Publications
Significant monitoring publications are produced each year. These tend to focus on a specific education sector, priority population group, and/or an education strategy related to one of these sectors or groups. Key measures such as student attendance rates are used in these publications.
What attendance data does the Ministry collect and why?
The Ministry collects data on student attendance and data on what activities schools take in response to absences.
Attendance is the first step in accessing learning, achieving education success and improving wellbeing and lifelong outcomes. Ministry analysis shows that attending school is linked to a student’s wellbeing and achievement.
Attendance data is core information required by the Ministry for monitoring the schooling system.
For more detail on what personal information we collect, why we collect it and how we look after it, please see the privacy statement below.
Privacy statement: Student attendance data collections
What this document tells you
The purpose of this privacy statement is to explain to students, parents, caregivers and whānau why the Ministry of Education collects information about student attendance from schools, what we use it for and how we look after it.
It covers the data the Ministry collects on student attendance and the data we collect on what activities schools take in response to absences.
What personal information is collected
The attendance data for each student that is collected from schools includes:
- National Student Number (NSN)
- Student management system (SMS) student ID
- Gender
- Current year level
- Ethnicity
- Student type (e.g. full-time or part-time)
- Dates of attendance/absence
- Reason for absence as recorded by the school using the Ministry’s attendance codes
- Response activity taken in relation to a student’s absence
- Date a response activity is taken
- Attendance management plan (AMP) / Stepped Attendance Response (STAR) threshold of absence for a student at the time a response activity was taken
- How many half-days of absence a student has accumulated during a term.
Why we collect your personal information
Attendance is the first step in accessing learning, achieving education success and improving wellbeing and lifelong outcomes. Ministry analysis shows that attending school is linked to a student’s wellbeing and achievement.
Attendance data is core information required by the Ministry for monitoring the schooling system. The Ministry primarily collects student attendance data on a regular basis – weekly and daily.
We use the student attendance and response activity data to:
- monitor student attendance and absence patterns and support policy development
- monitor how schools are managing attendance and providing support where needed
- implement and monitor interventions aimed at improving attendance, including use of student-level data to inform work led by the attendance service providers. Attendance service providers are contracted by the Ministry to work with chronically absent and non-enrolled students.
- support reporting, including the datasets and reports published on Education Counts
- carry out analysis to identify trends and patterns and produce insights about “what works for whom, in what circumstances” to feed back to schools.
Attendance data is also used for general research and statistics, in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020. This may include linking attendance data with other student data, for example, for research on the correlation between student attendance and NCEA achievement. Care is taken that no individual can ever be identified from published analysis.
Why we collect your information from schools
Section 237A of the Education and Training Act 2020 requires schools to keep attendance records and allows the Secretary to make rules setting out administrative and procedural requirements relating to attendance records.
The administrative and procedural requirements, including a requirement to send attendance and response activity data to the Ministry, are contained in the Education (School Attendance) Regulations 2024 and the School Attendance Rules 2026.
Given schools are required to record attendance and response activity information in their student management systems, these data collections draw on student management system data to minimise burden on schools of providing this data.
How we collect your personal information
Attendance data is held in schools' student management systems. Attendance data is provided to the Ministry through automated processes on a regular basis.
When the Ministry receives the attendance data, checks are performed to ensure that data is accurate and complete.
How we keep your personal information safe
Once the Ministry receives attendance information, it is stored safely and securely in our Enterprise Data Warehouse. Attendance information is only accessed by Ministry staff who have a business need to use it.
Who we share your personal information with
Student attendance data collected by the Ministry is only shared where permitted under the Privacy Act, or other primary legislation, such as the Data and Statistics Act, Oranga Tamariki Act or Family Violence Act.
How long we keep your personal information
Attendance data held in the Ministry’s Education Data Warehouse is kept until it is no longer required for the purposes for which we collected it. Schools have different rules about how long they must keep student records.
Your rights under the Privacy Act 2020
The Privacy Act 2020 gives you the right to access information held about you and request correction of that information. To request access to your information, contact your school. Corrections made to student information held by the school can be resubmitted to the Ministry.
If you have questions that are not answered here, you can ask your school directly or contact us at Requests.DataandInsights@education.govt.nz
The measures
The key measure of attendance is the proportion of students who attend regularly, that is, the percentage of students who have attended more than 90% of half-days. A half-day can either be the minimum two hours before, or after, noon contributing to the minimum four hours of a school day.
The data source
Historically our data collection for attendance was a weeklong paper-based survey. This has subsequently moved to the electronic collection of data on a daily basis.
Starting in 2011, all state and state-integrated schools in New Zealand were invited to submit Term 2 attendance data. This was on a voluntary basis. Schools entering attendance records into their student management systems (SMS) were asked to provide an extract of this data electronically.
From 2020 schools were asked to provide attendance data for each term.
In 2025 it was made mandatory for schools to submit attendance data to the Ministry on a daily basis.
The electronic files supplied by schools contain detailed attendance records. Each half-day's attendance or non-attendance is then reported.
Collecting and processing attendance data
When the collection first started schools provided data to the Ministry via data collection forms. Now schools use the electronic attendance register (eAR) from their student management system (SMS) to create and send electronic attendance files daily. This process has been automated by school SMSs since the introduction of the daily attendance collection in 2025.
The following are the key steps in the collection, processing and release of termly attendance reports and data:
- Data collection and processing
Schools enter attendance data into their student management system (SMS), and this information is automatically sent to the Ministry at the end of each day. This information can be corrected by the school, via their SMS, while the data is considered provisional.
At the end of each term Every Day Matters summary reports are sent to each school, and schools are provided an opportunity to correct any outstanding issues.
Four weeks after the end of term this information is no longer considered provisional, and an initial suite of products is prepared for quality assurance and to support analysis.
- Quality assurance
Quality assurance and initial analysis cannot commence until the initial products have been produced. Additional time has been required over recent terms to understand unusual situations arising from COVID and its continued impacts. Processes may need to be adjusted and/or repeated to implement solutions.
- Data analysis and creation of products for Education Counts
Data analysis is undertaken. This sometimes requires detailed bespoke analyses to understand features of the data.
During this period products are prepared. Datasets are produced, spreadsheets are updated and reports written for release on Education Counts. Every Day Matters reports are produced for schools. All documents and products are carefully quality assured.
- Review and approval
Internal review and approval processes are followed. Before the Ministry releases the data publicly, we provide it to the Minister for their information only, under the no surprises principle, given significant public interest.
Some products are uploaded to internal databases to allow embargoed use by our regional staff, supporting their engagements with schools.