Recording starters and leavers consistently

There is a range of reasons why the accurate recording of a pupil's start and end date is important to the school, the pupil and the Local Authority (LA). One reason is to help us to track 'lost' children; another reason is the wish to move to a single standard measure of pupil mobility. This MI sheets asks you to:

ACTION Standardise pupils' starting and leaving dates

Pupil starting and leaving at normal points in the year

For most schools, most pupils will start in the first year of admission to the school and leave at the end of the final year of the school. During this time pupils must be seen to be in full time education. For this reason please

• Record those pupils starting at the normal time in your first year of admission as 1/9/year.
• Record those pupils leaving at the end of the year in the last year of your school as 31/8/year.*

* To meet statutory requirements, pupils leaving high school at the normal end of Year 11 must be recorded as leaving on the last Friday in June.

This standardisation will ensure there are no inappropriate breaks in the education record of a pupil.

Two points to remember:

1. To ensure your absence records are accurate it is important that you log the summer holiday dates in Phoenix (or other MI system).
2. A pupil starting late after transfer to your school should be recorded as starting on their first day of attendance, but you may have included them as part of a block entry as starting on the 1 September, this must be corrected or your absence figures will be incorrect.

Pupils starting and/or leaving mid-year

When a pupil starts or leaves mid-year it is important that the actual start/leaving date is recorded as accurately as possible.

For pupils starting mid-year record their start date as the date when they first attend lessons at your school. The only exception to this is where the parents have sought and been given by the new headteacher an authorised absence e.g. due to illness or for a pre-arranged holiday. In this case the start date should be the first date of authorised absence. Where possible you should check the leaving date recorded by the previous school to ensure the attendance dates are continuous and do not overlap.

1. For pupils leaving mid-year: the date when the legal conditions have been met to take them of roll. The Attendance Service is currently preparing further guidance on this for circulation to schools before the end of this term.

Phoenix can offer help:

The block intake of Pupils from feeder schools usually occurs at the beginning of the Academic Year. The Phoenix Gold software has procedures for importing the data, which are available from the ICT Solutions web site: http://ictsolutions.norfolk.gov.uk/phoenixnew/phoenixmain.asp. These guide you through the process including entering the admission date to your school, for each child (See screen shot below)

Alternatively new pupils can be entered in advance in the Pupil's New Intake section, where all known data, including the date of admission, can be entered direct into a Pupil's record - an Extract of Pupil's screen is shown below: