Reading attendance registers for patterns that matter
How pastoral leads in Dak Lak schools can spot chronic absence without drowning in daily mark sheets.
Daily attendance marks are easy to file and hard to read. A year group can look fine in a monthly total while the same twelve students miss every Monday after a long weekend.
Start with a simple three-band view: present most days, intermittent absence, and chronic absence. Chronic usually means missing enough days that classroom continuity breaks for that learner. Exact thresholds differ by school policy; what matters is applying one definition for the whole term.
Next, chart absences by day of week. In several Dak Lak campuses we have reviewed, Monday and Friday clusters appear after harvest periods or local festivals. That is different from scattered illness and calls for a different conversation with families.
Finally, compare attendance against assessment windows. A dip two weeks before mid-term tests is a teaching concern as much as a pastoral one. Keep the chart small enough to print on one page for form tutors.
Hillbase attendance studies follow this sequence so leaders receive a short pack rather than another spreadsheet to interpret alone.