A. The attendance guidance and addendum explain that there has been a temporary amendment to the Pupil Registration Regulations, adding an additional legal category of non-attendance, entitled: ‘Not attending in circumstances related to coronavirus’.
The guidance states that you are to use the ‘X’ and ‘I’ codes as you have detailed above (the Annex contains more detail about the appropriate use of the ‘X’ code). However, schools have been provided with some additional codes in their EIMS systems, as follows.
01: Illness
02: Illness, confirmed case of Covid-19
03-X01: Non-compulsory
school age
X02: Self isolating Covid-19 symptoms
X03: Self isolating Covid-19 contact inside of school
X04: Self isolating Covid-19 contact outside school
X05: Quarantine – Self isolating
X06: Shielding as advised
X07: Government advice not to attend.
These codes are optional and are to support schools in distinguishing between the different types of Covid-19-related absence and between Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 absence. These codes are mapped to an ‘X’ or an ‘I’ code as relevant and will not be collected by Census. Only the ‘X’ or ‘I’ codes will be collected.
These codes are for administration/internal data analysis. There is a link in the attendance guidance addendum that takes you to the information on these and the list in full. It states:
‘You can use this list of sub-codes which have been introduced into management information systems (MIS) to help you:
- extract attendance data to complete the daily educational settings status form consistently
- record non-attendance related to coronavirus (Covid-19)
- monitor non-attendance related to coronavirus (Covid-19) for your own purposes.
If you have an existing system for recording and monitoring non-attendance related to coronavirus you can continue to use this if you wish. The use of these sub-codes is not compulsory.’
(‘Addendum: recording attendance in relation to coronavirus (Covid-19) during the 2020 to 2021 academic year’, DfE, March 2021)
