Parent Reports - Adding attendance data to templates

It is possible to add a wide variety of attendance data to parent reports, in Insight, to suit your needs. Whether you want to add brief attendance information, create a more detailed attendance focussed report or even create a letter to send to parents of pupils with poor attendance, Insight should have the tools you need.

This guide assumes you already understand how parent report templates are managed and edited. Please see our guide on Parent Reports - Creating and Managing Report Templates if needed.

Attendance Placeholders

To see the available placeholders, first, choose any parent report template via Admin > Parent Report Templates.

Select the Placeholders tab and choose Attendance from the Display Placeholders for... menu.

Most of the placeholders should be self-explanatory. Like other placeholders, a brief description adds clarity.

The menus allow you to customise the date range the placeholder displays data for.

Academic Year

When Academic Year is selected all the placeholders operate over a particular academic year.

By default, this is the Report Academic Year. So if you create a report for the academic year 2025-2026 this is the year the placeholder will insert data for.

If you want to display data in your report for a prior academic year, you can choose Academic Year -1 to -3

For example, if the report year is 2025-2026 and your placeholder is Academic Year -1 then the placeholder will insert data for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Term

The Term selection allows you to insert data for a particular term or half-term.

As before, you can still choose a specific academic year using the Report Academic Year menu.

The Report Term menu has Report Term selected by default. So if you create a report for the academic year 2025-2026 Spring term, this is the year and term the placeholder will insert data for.

You can also choose to insert data for a half-term. Your assessment settings have no impact here. If you assess termly, in your school, you can still insert attendance data for a half-term.

Similar to Academic Year, you can also choose Report Term (or half-term) -1. This is helpful if you want to include data for the current term, for example, and also include last term's data for comparison.

If you want to choose a term for a fixed term, use the Fixed options. For example, use this if you want to insert Autumn data regardless of which term the report is for. These include all terms and half-terms.

Past 12 months

Use this option to create placeholders to insert data for the last 12 months. This can be particularly useful in the Autumn term if you want to display a set period of historical data.

Custom date range

Use this to pick specific dates between which you want to insert data.

Just choose your dates and the placeholders will update beneath accordingly.

Date range placeholder

When you create reports, it can be useful to include the date range the placeholders cover. The {Attendance: Date Range} placeholder will insert the beginning date, which will be the first day of the menu selection, and the end date. For example, 04/09/2024 to 11/07/2025.

If you want to specify an end date for the attendance data, use the option to update attendance data in approved parent reports.

Graphical Placeholders

Most of the placeholders insert text. Some will insert graphical images, based on the context of the Pupil Attendance report. An Insight provided template already makes use of these to recreate the majority of that report in a format suitable for sharing as a parent report.

The individual placeholders can be useful to help you generate your own bespoke reports.

They work as follows.

{Attendance: Threshold Description} : This will insert a banner, similar to the one at the top of the pupil Attendance tab.

{Attendance: Absence List} : This appears, in your Word template, as a standard text placeholder. It will insert a list of absence statistics as appropriate for each pupil. Like it's equivalent in the Pupil Attendance tab, it will only include values if a pupil has any of that category. For example, if a pupil has had no periods of absence due to illness, that line will not appear in the list.

If you want it to appear as a bullet list in your report, as above, then simply ensure the placeholder is bulleted in your template.

There is no placeholder available for Absence Patterns, as these are intended for use in school rather than shared with parents.

{Attendance: Percentage Chart} and {Attendance: Days Missed Chart} : Similar to Pupil Photo placeholders, these will paste an image in your Word file template. Unlike Pupil Photo placeholders, resizing the pasted image will not change the generated image in the final report.

They will insert bar charts, similar to the equivalent Pupil Attendance tab ones.

{Attendance: Cumulative Chart} : This will paste an image into your Word file template. Again, you should not resize the pasted image as it will not change the size in the generated reports.

It will insert a chart similar to the Cumulative Attendance % chart from the Pupil Attendance tab.

{Attendance: Weekly Bar Chart} and {Attendance: Day Chart} : These also insert an image, that should not be resized.

They insert the Weekly Attendance Overview from the Pupil Attendance tab; either as a weekly bar chart or as the full daily calendar view.

The DfE 10 in 10 threshold details are not shown as they are not intended to be shared with parents.