What Ofsted’s New 2025 Framework Means for Attendance and How Attend Helps Schools Meet Every Expectation
Posted: 29 November 2025
Ofsted’s Schools Inspection Framework (November 2025) marks a decisive shift in how attendance is understood, interpreted, and evaluated. Inspectors are no longer satisfied with headline figures and percentage bands; they want evidence of the systems behind the data — the decisions, the interventions, the communication, and the leadership oversight that shape a pupil’s experience.
A detailed breakdown of these changes is available on AttendanceMatters.co.uk, but what schools most need to understand is this: the new framework rewards early insight, clear analysis of barriers, well-matched intervention, and strong, joined-up documentation. This is exactly where Attend excels.
Attend is described in its handbook as:
"a school attendance improvement platform that brings together data, communication, and behavioural insights to help schools reduce absence and strengthen engagement.”
In practice, this means Attend gives schools the structured knowledge, visibility and workflow that Ofsted now expects to see in daily use, not just in inspection week.
Early Identification: Seeing Issues Before They Escalate
The new framework places enormous importance on spotting emerging concerns quickly rather than reacting weeks later. Attend supports this by synchronising with the MIS and presenting schools with real-time insight. Rather than scanning spreadsheets or waiting for weekly reports, staff can see, at a glance, which cohorts are showing dips, which pupils are beginning to disengage, and where patterns of concern are forming across year groups, groups of students, or vulnerable cohorts.
The dashboards are a particular strength here. They don’t simply visualise attendance; they interpret it. Leaders can move seamlessly between whole-school views, week-by-week comparisons with DfE data, group-level breakdowns (SEND, PP, EHCP, custom nurture or AP groups), punctuality patterns, rolling 10-week attendance, and absence distribution.
This aligns perfectly with Ofsted’s expectation that schools understand not just outcomes but context - who is affected, how patterns are shifting, and where support must be directed.
Automated “Signals” generated through Absence Watch build on this intelligence. These prompt staff as soon as thresholds are crossed or patterns of concern emerge, ensuring that no student goes unnoticed and no decline is spotted too late.
Understanding Barriers: A Framework Expectation Now Built into Attend
One of the clearest messages in the 2025 framework is that attendance cannot improve through percentages alone. Schools must understand the reasons behind absence - whether they are rooted in SEND needs, medical concerns, anxiety or EBSA, social or family difficulties, curriculum access issues, or something more nuanced.
Attend’s Barriers to Attendance module allows schools to record and categorise these issues clearly and consistently. Instead of relying on scattered notes, Excel files, or memory, staff build a coherent picture of each pupil’s circumstances. This helps ensure interventions are proportionate, compassionate, and well-matched to need - exactly the approach Ofsted describes when discussing effective attendance practice.
Targeted Interventions: Showing That Support Is Thoughtful and Effective
Ofsted now looks not just at whether an intervention took place but whether it was appropriate and whether it made a difference. Attend’s structured workflow gives schools the tools to demonstrate both.
The platform’s staged approach to intervention - configurable to match each school’s policy - means that pupils move through a clear, consistent pathway based on their level of concern and improvement. Stages can incorporate monitoring periods, improvement recognition, medical exceptions, and escalation to LA involvement where needed. Schools using Attend do not simply “send a letter”; they follow a considered process supported by evidence.
Every action taken from phone calls and meetings to home visits, attendance plans, pastoral input, or SEND-related adjustments can be logged in detailed Student Notes, which support file uploads, threaded responses, and staff collaboration. Tasks and reminders help ensure nothing is forgotten, and the chronology becomes rich with meaningful evidence rather than brief, disconnected entries.
Tools like Goal Seek and Milestones bring the intervention story to life. Staff can show exactly how many days of good attendance are needed for a pupil to move out of PA or reach a target, and these targets can be shared directly with families through Attend’s parent communication system.
Documentation, Chronology and Evidence: Where Attend Really Stands Out
One of the biggest changes in the new framework is the expectation that schools hold a full narrative of a pupil’s attendance journey showing not just the figures but the actions, the decision-making, the communication, the reviews, and the impact of support.
Attend’s entire architecture is built around creating this chronological evidence trail:
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Every communication is recorded - whether via email, text, portal message, or automated update
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Parent replies are stored with staff responses
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All notes and interventions sit within a threaded timeline
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Letters are generated and linked to actions taken
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Home visits, tasks, meetings, and outcomes are captured with clarity
Most powerfully, Attend can generate a complete student profile export - a polished, multi-page chronology that brings together attendance history, barriers, interventions, parent communication, staff notes, and behaviour of attendance over time. Schools routinely use these exports for LA referrals, attendance panels, and safeguarding meetings, and Ofsted now expects this level of documented clarity.
High-Quality Parental Communication: Behavioural Science Underpinning
The new framework stresses the importance of consistent, timely communication that is clear, accessible, and supportive. Attend approaches this through a behavioural-science lens. Absence Watch can send personalised nudges when patterns emerge, celebrate improvements, share week-by-week updates, and deliver guidance that educates parents on the impact of missed learning, all with built-in translation support and readability-optimised templates.
Parents can reply directly, creating a digital audit of conversations that prevents misunderstandings and reduces the burden on phone lines. These replies become evidence of engagement, something Ofsted will increasingly examine.
Leadership Oversight and Safeguarding: Joined-Up Intelligence
The new framework is explicit: leaders must have a strategic grasp of attendance. Attend gives SLT and governors a coherent view of everything happening across the school from whole-school trends to vulnerable cohorts, punctuality patterns, PA risk, and the progress of interventions.
This is reinforced by Attend’s structured onboarding, embedded practice, and long-term review model, described in the handbook as the school’s Attend Journey. This provides a rhythm of strategic reflection and improvement that ties directly into the framework’s expectations around leadership and management.
Safeguarding is equally strengthened. Attendance is a safeguarding issue, and Attend highlights patterns that may indicate risk, records parent non-engagement, logs visits, and builds a chronology that can be shared in multi-agency contexts. This is a significant advantage over MIS-only approaches.
Impact: Closing the Loop Between Action and Outcome
Above all, the new framework wants to see impact. Attend provides a clear, continuous picture of whether interventions worked, whether attendance habits are improving, and whether pupils are engaging more consistently. Rolling 10-week views, improvement pathways, milestone tracking, and context-rich analysis give schools the evidence they need to demonstrate both progress and reflection.
In Summary
The 2025 framework raises the bar in every aspect of attendance: early identification, barrier analysis, intervention quality, documentation, communication, leadership oversight, safeguarding, and demonstrable impact.
Attend meets every one of these expectations by design.
Rather than scrambling for data, trying to rebuild lost chronologies, or relying on disconnected tools, schools using Attend can show Ofsted, and themselves, a coherent, structured, and proactive approach to attendance.
It turns attendance from a reactive, time-consuming task into a visible, evidence-led, strategic part of school life.