Daily attendance
This page contains information on the numbers of students attending school each day.
Last Updated: May 2024
Daily Attendance Dashboard
* When a date is missing during term time this is due to public holidays, regional holidays, and teacher-only days.
The data reported in this dashboard is a snapshot of attendance for the reported week. Schools are encouraged to update attendance data through the term as usual as more information becomes available for individual students, although these updates will not be reflected in this dashboard. The termly regular attendance reporting will be based on the most up to date attendance information provided by schools.
About the Measures
The dashboard is updated each Monday with data from the previous school week. The measure shown is the percentage of enrolled students who were present each day, for four hours or more.
The measure used here is different from the Regular Attendance indicator and from attendance during Covid.
How does Daily Attendance relate to Regular Attendance?
The Government has set a target of 80% regular attendance each term by 2030. To achieve this, we are advising schools that they need to aspire to reach an average daily attendance rate above 94%. The red line on the dashboard represents this rate of 94%.
Daily Attendance reports on how many students are at school each day. Regular attendance summarises attendance over a whole term for each student and then reports on how many students fall into each of the four regular attendance categories: regular attendance, irregular absence, moderate absence, chronic absence. The relationship between these two measures is complex due to the different ways that attendance is being summarised (across students each day, or across the term for each student).
What does this show me about attendance?
Based on termly attendance data we expect to see the numbers and percentages of students attending each day fluctuating depending on the day of the week, the week of the term and the time of the year. For example, attendance tends to be lower at the end of the week, around public holidays, and at the end of the term.
Why is Attendance important?
Attendance is linked to both student wellbeing and to attainment. Ministry of Education insights studies[1] show that attending school and kura regularly is, on average, associated with more positive wellbeing outcomes. Ministry analysis found that 15-year-old students who reported skipping a greater number of days of school in the previous fortnight reported worse outcomes on average for a number of measures of wellbeing; schoolwork-related anxiety, sense of belonging, exposure to bullying, motivation and experiences of teacher unfairness.
Attendance is also linked to student attainment in secondary students. Recent research[2] shows that each additional half-day of absence from school and kura is associated with a consistent reduction in the number of NCEA credits students subsequently attain – whether that is a student moving from 100% to 99% attendance or moving from 71% to 70% attendance. Students who are absent even 5-10% of the time (which is still considered “regular” attendance) nevertheless obtain fewer NCEA credits than those with higher attendance rates. In short, evidence suggests that there is no “safe” level of non-attendance which has no impact on student and ākonga wellbeing and attainment.
Measures
Percentage of students present
Numerator: The total number of students recorded as present at school for four or more hours on the given day.
Denominator: The total number of students in state and state-integrated schools for whom attendance data was received.
School Response Rate: This is the percentage of all state and state-integrated schools that contributed attendance data for the current week.
Total number of students: This is the total number of students expected to be present each day at the schools who contributed data. This includes all students enrolled in state and state-integrated schools (except those enrolled solely with Te Kura | The Correspondence School). This total does not include students of compulsory school age who are not currently enrolled in a school.
Detailed attendance records are required for the analysis in this report, therefore only schools that provide attendance data electronically are able to be included in this analysis.
More information about the collection of attendance data, including when regular attendance reports are scheduled for release, can be found on the Attendance Data Collection page.
Footnotes
- He Whakaaro: School attendance and student wellbeing, Ministry of Education, February 2020.
- He Whakaaro: What is the relationship between attendance and attainment? Ministry of Education, February 2020.