What it does to your week
The children who need you, before it is too late
A watch list of everyone drifting below your own target, and who is recovering. Plus a forecast of who falls into persistent absence at the next export if nothing changes. The point of an attendance system is the conversation you have next week, not the number you had last term.
The families to reach before a fine is ever discussed
Nobody wants to issue a penalty notice. The DfE's threshold is ten unauthorised sessions in any ten school weeks. Knowing who is two or three sessions away is how you offer help while help still changes the outcome. Counted for every pupil, with the exact ten weeks shown. So the conversation happens early, and the figure holds up if it is ever questioned.
The data you already hold, finally readable
Everything here is already in your MIS, the system your registers live in. Nobody can read it there on a Monday morning. Out of the same exports: which weekday the absence really falls on, mornings against afternoons, and which groups sit above the school's own rate. A day standing clear across the whole school is usually timetable or transport rather than families, which is a different conversation entirely.
Or let your MIS send it every night
Connect your MIS and your attendance marks, late marks, groups, brothers and sisters, and parents and carers arrive overnight, with nothing to export or upload. Every tab shows last night's figures when you open it in the morning, and your snapshots every few weeks show the progress between them.
See which interventions are improving attendance
Where your school has automatic MIS sync switched on. Choose which of your MIS groups are interventions, and see each child's attendance before they joined and since, each group against the whole school over the same days, and the children in no group who might be helped by one.
Ready for inspection, in their language
Ofsted's 2026 framework asks whether attendance is broadly in line with national averages, or improving over time. You get both, against the published DfE figures for England and for your own local authority. You also get the likely questions, with your own numbers already in the answers.
Reports that go straight into the meeting
A governor and trustee summary with no pupil named in it. An inspection report. A confidential welfare list for the Education Welfare Officer, dashboards for teachers, and a warm one-page report for a family. All laid out ready to print or to talk through at parents' evening.
Figures you can defend
Everything follows the DfE method: session weighted, persistent absence at or below 90%, severe at or below 50%. All of it decided on session counts rather than rounded percentages. Every report states how its figures were reached, because the method is the first thing challenged.
Progress you can show
How do our pupil groups compare with England?
Your free school meals, SEND and EAL pupils against the same groups nationally, from the DfE's own figures. Where a group is doing better, it says so first.
Who has come back up?
The children whose attendance has recovered, as plainly as the ones who need support. Each is a call home worth making.
What moved since the last export?
Improving and declining side by side, so the year group that has turned a corner is as easy to find as the one that needs a conversation.
Are we doing better than this time last year?
The comparison governors ask for, like for like. Ofsted looks for attendance in line with national averages or improving over time.
Four questions, already answered
How many pupils have moved into persistent absence, and how many out?
The figure can hold steady while children cross the line in both directions: two completely different terms described by one number.
What would our attendance be if every late arrival had been on time?
Every session marked U is a morning a child was in school and counted absent. The one figure entirely inside a school's own gift.
Is our absence concentrated in a few children or spread across the school?
Two schools on the same figure can need opposite work: casework with a dozen families, or a conversation about term-time holidays.
Which families are approaching the penalty notice threshold, and when?
Nobody wants to issue one. Ten unauthorised sessions in a rolling ten-week window, recounted every time the data updates, so help is offered while it still changes the outcome.
Every name and figure above is invented. There are no screenshots of anyone's children here, on purpose.
How it starts
Export from your MIS
The reports you already run. They are standard attendance reports, and there are templates if you need to build one.
Drop the file in
Columns are matched for you, whatever they happen to be called this year. Import as often as suits you, in any order, and the system works out the sequence. Or connect your MIS and let it sync overnight.
The whole picture appears
Every tab, every report and every comparison, filled in. No setup project, no consultancy, no training week.
Persistent absence does not arrive one morning. It builds, one Friday at a time, in plain sight.
Children's data, handled properly
This is a record of children, so the safeguards are part of the product rather than a page in a policy. Your administrator can see all of it written out, role by role, inside the system.
Governors never see a pupil's name
Not on a screen, not in a report. The rule sits with the data rather than on the screen, so there is no way round it.
Teachers see their own classes
You choose whether a teacher sees the whole school or only their own classes or years.
You can see who looked at what
Every import, every settings change, and every report of pupil names that leaves the system, including anything iCT4 does. Your administrator can read the log.
Your school's own sign-in
Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, whichever your school runs. No new passwords for anyone to write on a sticky note. Your school's own sign-in rules and multi-factor authentication apply, because it is your data and your account.
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Ask us for a trial and we will set your school up, so the first thing you look at is your own school rather than a demonstration.
Nobody ever improved attendance by reading a spreadsheet. They improved it by ringing home.
Why it is called adsum
Adsum is Latin for “I am here”. It is the word a child answered with when a teacher read the register aloud, one name at a time.
That is the whole idea in one word. Attendance is not a percentage. It is a series of individual answers. The work is knowing which of them went unsaid, and why, while a school can still do something about it.
The name is written by hand for the same reason. Registers were kept by hand long before anyone exported one. And the child at the end of every figure in here is the point of all of it.
Ready to look at your own figures?
Sign in with your school account, Microsoft or Google. If your school is already set up, you are in. If not, you can ask for access on the next screen and iCT4 will get you started.
From £299 + VAT a year, one price for the whole school by size of roll. What it costs.
Your school decides who is granted access.