Obtaining & Importing Weekly Attendance

What is Weekly Attendance data?

The DfE collects daily attendance data from all state-funded schools via Wonde and makes the information available to Local Authorities through 'View Your Education Data' (VYED).

Nexus' Weekly Attendance functionality leverages the DfE-provided output files together with other information already loaded into Nexus, such as through the school census, to provide an in-depth analysis of the Weekly Attendance data.

Importance of updating Nexus regularly

Weekly Attendance analysis in Nexus became available in the September 2025 release. This is a departure from other elements of Nexus as it requires regular weekly imports by each Local Authority to maximise the value of the analysis. Most other parts of Nexus require annual or termly updates.

Each LA's consistent and proactive use of this import will be what makes the functionality successful. Each LA that sees the value in the analysis needs to invest time in importing the data regularly for its own benefit and that of the NCER community. The amount of data available in the analysis pages depends on the frequency of import from your LA and other LAs.

We strongly recommend downloading the file from the View Your Education Data portal each week. The new weekly file contains cumulative data; however, the previous week's specific data is unavailable for download when the new file is published. Missing a week may impact your analysis.

Where to get the Weekly Attendance data

All Local Authorities have access to 'View Your Education Data' through DfE Sign-in. It is likely that members of your team will already have the necessary permissions to view and download that data, but if that is not the case, check with your attendance teams and/or data teams or request your own account for View Your Education Data. If you do need to request access, the specific module to be requested is: 'Monitor your school attendance'

Once logged in to DfE Sign In, the process to download the data is:

Navigate to 'View your attendance data'
Select 'Monitor your school attendance'
Select 'Attendance data downloads'

There's a short video illustrating the process below.

There will be two files available, examples of which are shown below (names will be different for your LA and the week). The file format will be:

Official_Sensitive_nnnnnnnn_School_Attendance_yyyymmdd where

nnnnnnnn is the LA UKPRN
yyyy is the year
mm is the month
dd is the day, e.g. 05 for the 5th

The first file shown is the latest file to download, it is expected that this file will be updated each week. DfE state on View Your Education Data that the file will be made available on Monday for the week ending the previous Friday. Experience shows that file name formats have been inconsistent and may vary depending on the day that DfE actually publish it which could be the Saturday, Sunday or Monday.

The second file relates to the previous academic year and will include a date after the end of the academic year (for example 1st August 2025 to cover the 24/25 academic year in full)

We also suggest loading in the file from the end of the 24/25 year as part of your initial population of the system. This will allow you to make comparisons on the previous academic year.

(If you already have copies of the weekly file from 24/25 downloaded and saved already, you can also import these, or to save time, just import the last file of the year, as this contains the cumulative data for the entire year and will power your aggregates.)

Download and save the latest file available.

You are now finished with View Your Education Data for that week and can navigate to Nexus for the next step.

Where and how to import Weekly Attendance data into Nexus

Weekly Attendance data is imported through the Keypas area of Nexus and the usual import wizard functionality. Keypas > Imports > Import New File > Weekly Attendance Data.

Please note that only CSV files are accepted. You may upload a ZIP file containing multiple files, but it must include only CSV files and no subfolders.

A new file is published every Saturday – download it each week and keep it safe. Missing weeks will make your trend data incomplete or inaccurate.

Steps to import:

Click Add Related Files and select your CSV or ZIP file.
Click Upload to start the import.
Click Cancel Upload if you need to stop.

You do not need to select an academic year - as is sometimes necessary for other imports. Nexus reads the year from the file itself and assigns it appropriately.

Once imported into Nexus, Weekly Attendance analysis is immediately available through Insight (unlike the rest of Insight which caches data overnight)

Data in the imports will be retained for a maximum of 2 years, the current year and the previous year.

Other imports

The process above imports the main attendance file into Nexus covering all pupils. There is an additional import needed to support social care / virtual school users of Nexus. This import allows the LA to specify the current virtual school cohort (and eventually will allow additional social care groups like CIN and CPP to be specified). This is an important step as virtual school cohorts change frequently as children move in and out of care. Frequent attendance imports need to be matched by current cohorts for social care.

The process of importing this Weekly Attendance Social Care import is described HERE.

Weekly Attendance Forum

The Weekly Attendance functionality has a new forums area dedicated to the process of importing and the analysis provided. If you have any questions outside of use of the system itself, that will be a good place to seek advice and opinions from counterparts in other LA.

Other related guides

The following pages describe the Weekly Attendance Analysis in Nexus

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