Dear Service Provider,
As you are aware, attendance records must be maintained for each room/session operated by a service. These records must include:
- Date
- Child’s full name
- Time of arrival and departure
- Absences
While “daily” records must be maintained, this does not require a separate page/sheet to be maintained for each individual day. Any reference to “daily” means that attendance records must be maintained for every day the service is in operation. Indeed, it is advised that the format of the attendance records is not daily sheets, but rather each page shows at least one week of attendance (i.e. weekly sheets/roll books). This will greatly support services when tracking attendance patterns of individual children, to assist in submitting weekly NCS Hive returns and keeping ECCE and CCSP Saver Programme registrations up to date.
Compliance Visit
Compliance Visit Officers always use the records that are recorded by the staff in the room in real time when carrying out an inspection. The service must maintain original attendance records. Services should not copy onto a new record or destroy the original i.e. do not make duplicate records. If the original records are in weekly/monthly format, then the time spent onsite for a compliance inspection is greatly reduced. Where electronic records are maintained, these should also be able to produce reports which can show weekly/monthly attendance per child and per room/session.In order to assist services in maintaining compliant attendance records, an attendance record guide has been provided with an example of a recommended weekly format.
The guide can be found within the compliance section of the ECCE programme documents on the Hive here. While the document refers to ECCE, the guidance is applicable to all programmes. However, please note that the document refers to maintaining records onsite from the beginning of the cycle. While this is applicable to ECCE and CCSP Saver Programme, for NCS, 12 months records must be maintained onsite.
