Attendance Monitoring

Welfare Call’s National Attendance Monitoring Service

Accurate, same-day data to improve attendance and outcomes across vulnerable cohorts.

More than 41,000 pupils in 8,500 schools across 75% of the UK rely on Welfare Call to monitor their most vulnerable children. Our real-time attendance data helps you target interventions before problems escalate, raise attendance levels, and meet statutory safeguarding duties with confidence.

The challenge

You can’t intervene if you don’t have the data Attendance data is a vital tool for Local Authorities but it’s often inconsistent, incomplete, or arrives too late. Without it, it’s impossible to identify issues early or measure the impact of your interventions.

We understand the pressures on Virtual Schools, Inclusion teams, and Children’s Services professionals. Our service solves the problem by delivering accurate, same-day attendance data from every school and setting in your remit.

Last year alone, we:

More than CLA

Monitor every vulnerable cohort Since the DfE expanded the remit of Virtual Schools to cover all children with a social worker, we’ve invested heavily in our systems to meet the challenge and go further.

We monitor attendance for:

  • Children Looked After (CLA)
  • Children in Need (CiN)
  • Children on Child Protection plans (CP)
  • Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC)
  • Children Missing Education (CME)
  • Pupils in Alternative Provision, PRUs, and Post-16
  • Kinship care 
  • Children missing education (CME)
  • Youth Justice
  • SEN
  • Early Years to Post 18

We also track pupil transitions between cohorts – including step-ups and step-downs – and link these to attendance and exclusion patterns. This gives Directors of Social Care, Virtual School Heads, and Social Workers the insight to:

Spot disengagement early
Support smooth transitions
Inform care plans and manage caseloads effectively

How it works

Connect

We collect daily attendance using a clever blend of methods — secure MIS integration, our school portal, or direct daily calls from our dedicated team.

Monitor

Access live dashboards showing attendance, exclusions, and cohort transitions in one place, with filters by school, setting, or individual child.

Act

Set custom thresholds and receive alerts when absence patterns trigger concern - for a specific cohort, group of schools, or an individual.

Our hybrid collection models means we offer automated MIS integration via Wonde, plus dedicated call handlers for those that can’t or won’t connect.

This ensures full coverage — no gaps — and helps avoid the risk of schools self-selecting what data to send. That’s especially critical for safeguarding and monitoring vulnerable children especially those in Alternative Provisions, unregistered settings and those placed in elective home education.

What you get

  • Daily attendance and exclusions for multiple cohorts (CLA, CiN, CP, UASC, CME, Post-16)
  • Multi-method collection: MIS, school portal, or phone contact
  • Cohort transition tracking including step-ups/step-downs
  • Exclusions and attendance linked in one system
  • Customisable alert thresholds per cohort or child
  • Cloud-based dashboards and reporting tools for strategic and operational use
  • Full onboarding and ongoing UK-based support

Built for Local Authorities Trusted by over 96 Local Authorities, our service helps you stay compliant, improve safeguarding, and target interventions more effectively.

  • Virtual School Heads – Monitor CLA, CiN, CP, and Post-16 learners every day, not just at PEP reviews
  • Attendance & Inclusion Teams – Identify trends and tackle persistent absence early
  • Children’s Social Care – See how care plan changes align with school engagement
  • Safeguarding & Strategic Leads – Use high-quality data to inform board-level decisions and inspections.
  • Directors of Childrens Services and Social Care – Support with your Statutory returns
  • DfE and Ofsted – supporting ILAC and SEND inspections

The most popular choice for attendance monitoring

Why choose Welfare Call?

For over 20 years, we’ve worked in partnership with Local Authorities to safeguard children through reliable, actionable data.

Our Attendance Monitoring Service combines policy-led product design, multi-method collection for maximum coverage, and expert UK-based support. We don’t just provide data – we make sure it’s accurate, timely, and ready to use.

Work with specialists who understand your challenges — our in-house subject level experts who have previously worked in Virtual Schools/Local Authorities means you benefit from best practices, streamline your processes, deliver immediate impact and maximise outcomes.

What our customers say

Testimonials

Gemma Meiklejohn Deputy Head, Swindon Virtual School

Without Welfare call, we could not function as a virtual school. We use Welfare call for Attendance collection, PEP completion and analytics, Welfare call will inform us of all issues, that sometimes social workers forget to share – exclusions, wrong data etc. They are incredibly thorough in all they do. What makes this company stand out to me is their ability to help, respond and adapt to any queries/requests you make. No question around the system is deemed ridiculous – they are simply there to help. The wealth of data this system brings is invaluable – and we certainly couldn’t work without their system – or the people up in Barnsley!

Karen Reid Virtual School Head, London Borough of Merton Virtual School

Want to see it in action? Whether you’re looking to modernise your process or want to see how we can support CLA, CiN and CP attendance, we’d be happy to show you. We value the flexibility, availability and the personalised service we receive from Welfare Call. Whoever communicates with them from the Virtual School receives a response which is rapid, friendly and efficient. The staff at Welfare Call are excellent communicators; they listen to our requests and follow through willingly. They consistently provide a service tailored to our needs. Having worked with them regarding our children in care, we had no hesitation in commissioning them to roll out our attendance tracking for children on CIN and CP plans.