Local authorities must complete the parental responsibility measures attendance census each September or October.

You must submit details of the controls you put in place in the previous academic year to help parents make sure their children attend school, including:

• parenting contracts
• parenting orders
• penalty notices for unauthorised absence
• number of cases you’ve entered into the attendance case management system

Important dates

Dates for the 20242025 census:

• census opens: 43 September 20242025
• deadline for submitting data: 1817 October 20242025

Submit your data

You’ll need to:

• register and log in with DfE Sign-in
• use COLLECT to submit your data

Please contact your school or local authority approver, if:

• you want to request a DfE Sign-in username or password so you can access COLLECT
• ‘parental responsibility measures attendance’ is not on the list of collections you can see in COLLECT

Get help using DfE Sign-in

If you do not know who your approver is, please use the DfE Sign-in request form.

If you’ve forgotten your password, use DfE Sign-in to reset it. You will need to click ‘Start now’ and then the ‘I’ve forgotten my password’ link.

Note that we’ll only be able to change the status of your data submission to ‘authorised’ once you’ve cleared all errors in the data in COLLECT.

Census documents

The following documents will help you complete the census:

• guide for local authorities
• COLLECT guides

Do you need help?

Submitting data

Please use the service request form if you have any questions about your data. We aim to answer your question within 5 working days.

Feedback

Please use the feedback form if you have any comments about our data collection service, including COLLECT and the helpdesk service.