Chronic absenteeism remains a major challenge for schools, and it can be difficult to identify patterns, understand root causes, and take timely action to support students. Too often, the data schools need is either fragmented across multiple systems, inconsistent or incomplete.
Attendance Trends helps solve this by offering clear, visual insights into absenteeism, providing schools with a way of better understanding reasons for absences, which allows them to more proactively approach the challenge. Attendance staff and administrators can easily explore absence trends over time—broken down by absence type and reason—through dynamic, easy-to-read charts. With the ability to adjust timeframes, such as focusing on a specific month or viewing an entire semester, schools can more effectively monitor patterns, uncover insights, and develop proactive, targeted strategies to support students and families before attendance issues escalate. Attendance Trends will be part of the new Attendance Improvement Plus package.
When will Attendance Trends be available?
Attendance Trends is a part of the new Attendance Improvement Plus package that will be available as an add on license for back-to-school 2025.
Who will have access to Attendance Trends?
Attendance Trends will be available in the TalkingPoints for Schools web application for partners who have purchased the Attendance Improvement Plus package. School users with permission to access the Attendance module will have access to viewing attendance trend data.
Where can partners access Attendance Trends?
The Attendance trends tab is accessed from the Attendance page:
On the Attendance Trends page, users will see three charts highlighting trends related to absence data:
Chart #1 : Percentage of absences by absence type:
Chart #1 : Percentage of absences by absence type:
Purpose: Help track and compare the proportion of absences by the main absence categories, and see how that ratio changes over time.
Includes:
Excused absences
Unexcused with a reason
Unexcused without a reason (as defined by school/district-provided values)
Chart #2: Breakdown of reasons for absence
Chart #2: Breakdown of reasons for absence
Purpose: Shows the different reasons students are reported absent and how often each reason comes up during a selected time period. It also lets you compare the most common absence reasons over time to spot trends or changes.
Includes:
Top absence categories (up to ten) for a given time period. The categories are derived from your student information system (SIS), with some advanced categorization provided by TalkingPoints. Since the categories are based on individual school data, the categories may vary between schools and/or over time.
“No Reason Given” category, capturing all absences with empty reason values or school/district-provided values indicating no reason was provided (e.g., system-generated values) for comparison purposes.
“Uncategorized” and “Other” categories may be included when absence reasons could not be categorized or when there are more than 10 categories to display.
Chart #3: Students absences over time
Chart #3: Students absences over time
Purpose: Provide quick insights into overall trends and track how absences change throughout the school year—including both the number of chronically absent students (those missing 10% or more of school days) and the number of absent students.
Includes:
The yellow line shows students who are chronically absent
The blue line shows all absent students
Users will be able to adjust date ranges for these charts, including a custom date range (e.g., based on their semester schedule).
Is there a way to see the detailed data behind these charts?
Although you cannot drill down into specific information on the Attendance trends page at this time, you can find more detailed information in the Attendance dashboard that corresponds to these charts. This is done when a user selects a view on the Attendance dashboard that corresponds to the data you want to drill into. The student attendance table then shows the data behind that view. (see image below). Additionally, users can create a custom view, for example, "More than 10% absence rate," to see any students who are currently chronically absent.
Additionally, for Charts 1 and 3, you can create custom views on the Attendance dashboard to dig deeper into specific metrics. For example, you can filter the table to show:
All absences
Unexcused absences
Unexcused absences without a reason
Students who are frequently absent (e.g., by creating a view for students with absences totaling 10% or more)
These tools give you more flexibility to track and analyze attendance data in a way that supports early intervention and better-informed decisions.
How does it work?
Attendance data used in the absence trends charts is pulled directly from the student information system (SIS) using the TalkingPoints Connector data integration. TalkingPoints then uses advanced categorization (including AI) of the raw data derived from your SIS to make it easier to leverage the data when reviewing charts and trends.
On the Attendance Trends page, users can adjust the chart timeframes using the preset options or they can customize their own dates, for example, to look at a semester.
Can users download or export these charts?
Yes. Users can export the charts as .PNG or JPG files.