If you work in education in any capacity, you will need to use an attendance sheet.
Attendance sheet templates are used to keep track of class attendance, monitor students’ attendance habits, and help to keep them safe.
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Attendance Sheet Templates
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The Importance of Attendance Sheets
Using a free printable attendance tracker is an excellent way to ensure student safety, as this document can be used in the event of an emergency too.
Attendance sheet templates can also be used in the workplace to track employee attendance and monitor attendance habits. If you’re a manager of a team, small or large, it’s important that you keep track of employee attendance and lateness.
You can download an attendance sheet template, where you can input all of your students’ or employees’ names, and begin tracking daily attendance.
What is an attendance sheet?
An attendance sheet is as simple as it sounds: a template used to track attendance.
However, actually recording attendance requires more than just a simple tick in a box.
Attendance Sheets For Teachers
In education, students can be absent from school for a variety of reasons. Illness, doctor’s appointments, family reasons, or even truancy. Being aware of the reasons why a child is absent from school is important for several reasons.
Firstly, recording class attendance daily ensures that the child’s safety is the number one priority. If the school is not contacted about why a student is absent, then the attendance sheet helps teachers to flag this with the appropriate staff members.
Secondly, if a child is truanting from school, it may be because of an issue in school itself. Students should always feel safe in school, so it is essential that educators address potential issues such as bullying, which can impact attendance.
Record attendance habits
An attendance template helps teachers to recognize the attendance habits of their students.
Perhaps a student is always absent on a Friday, and this is becoming a pattern. Maybe Friday is the designated math test day.
You can therefore establish a link between attendance habits and particular days of the week. This can help you to explore ideas to improve student attendance for a particular student, by discussing the potential issue with them.
Attendance Sheets in the Workplace
Attendance sheets are also frequently used in a variety of workplace settings.
It is essential that employee safety is a priority for managers. In the event of a fire or emergency, attendance sheets should be used to monitor who is present. All managers should have access to an attendance sheet for this purpose.
Improving Punctuality by Recording Attendance
Attendance sheets also ensure that attendance habits are monitored, and, in particular, lateness.
Ensuring that employees are on time for work, and tracking any patterns of lateness, creates a culture of punctuality in the workplace. You can recognize employee attendance habits clearly with an attendance template.
Attendance Sheet Examples
What are attendance sheets used for?
Attendance sheets can be used for more than just checking class attendance or employee absences.
Improved student attendance through a reward system
As a teacher, I know how difficult it can be to encourage students to come to school every day, especially older students.
Having a reward available for students who have 100% attendance, such as a ‘Perfect Attendance‘ reward, or even a reward for a student with the ‘Most Improved Attendance’ can be a great way to motivate students to attend school.
The reward should be simple and in line with your school policy, of course. It could be something such as a longer lunch break or a gift voucher.
For younger children, stickers and gold stars are a great way to reward them. You can place the attendance sheet on a wall in class to help encourage them to attend every day.
Using the attendance sheet template in this way can also ensure that the focus is not always on the students who don’t attend classes.
Instead, it creates a positive culture in the classroom, where students who attend regularly and try hard to attend are rewarded.
Increased communication with parents or carers
Tracking class attendance with an attendance sheet template helps teachers to recognize attendance habits in students. It is also clear when a student is unexpectedly absent from school just from looking at the attendance sheet.
Teachers must contact parents or carers when children are absent from school without a reason, known as ‘unexcused absences,’ and this can help to build a relationship between the two groups.
An attendance sheet template ensures that parents are aware of the importance of their child attending school, whilst helping teachers to fix any issues happening in school that could be causing children to truant.
Safety
Attendance sheets are the first attendance monitoring system you should use in an emergency.
As they are printable, using an attendance sheet template with the correct student names and employee data ensures that you can accurately monitor attendance in the unfortunate event of an emergency.
It is efficient to have an online attendance template, but that does not mean a physical paper copy should be dismissed. It is safe to have one on hand during an emergency, in order to see who is present.
Homeschool Attendance Chart
When children are homeschooled, this does not mean regular school habits should be forgotten. Using attendance sheets to mark homeschool attendance can be a great way to encourage homeschool students to be on time for their schooling, and sets a good example for future work habits and punctuality.
Being on time is a skill children should master regardless of where they learn. Recording homeschool attendance using a free printable attendance tracker template can help to ensure students aren’t missing classes.
Field Trips or Volunteer Work
Attendance sheets can also be used outside of the classroom or workplace. Tracking attendance is necessary for field trips, ensuring that all students who should be there are present.
If you have organized a fundraiser, either in school or in the workplace, then it is essential to have an attendance chart to see who helps out. This is useful for safety purposes, but also ensures that the people who do volunteer are acknowledged for this in some way.
Attendance Sheet Samples
What should be included in the attendance sheet?
Daily attendance sheet templates are simplistic, in order to keep the amount of details to a minimum.
This not only helps to prevent confusion during an emergency, but is also more effective when recognizing attendance habits at a glance.
An attendance sheet template can be in paper form or used online through a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. You can edit our attendance templates in Google Sheets or as an Excel file to help you track daily attendance.
You can also have a monthly or yearly attendance sheet template with more dates, and there are attendance sheet templates available for this. These attendance templates help to give a more comprehensive overview of class or employee attendance.
Essential Things to Include
- Student or Employee Name
- Dates or days of the week
- A tick box to mark if they are present, late, or absent
- For students, contact details for a parent or carer
- For employees, their personal contact details, along with an emergency contact
You can also include extra columns in your attendance sheets to help you record and track additional data about student attendance, employees’ habits, or particular assignments.
Additional Things to Include
- A homework tracker
This can be a tick box, or a ‘completed/not completed’ section, with room for the teacher to write comments if necessary. - A reward system
This is particularly useful for younger students. This can be a column in the attendance template which includes space for stickers or gold stars. - Academic results
This is a useful feature to include in a monthly or yearly attendance sheet, as you can instantly see the students’ academic performance over a period of time. - Photos
If you have a particularly big class or team, then having photos next to each person’s name can be useful to help you remember each person. - A class or team photo
If you choose to display the attendance sheet somewhere, then this can be a nice touch to include, as it helps to remind students and employees that they all work together and should follow the same high standards of attendance. - Keep it simple
Ideally, an attendance sheet will be clear and easy to use, especially in the event that a substitute teacher is teaching the class, as this helps them to record attendance accurately without any help.
The attendance sheet should be visually pleasing if it is being displayed somewhere, and you can choose a colorful design from our attendance sheet templates to make your attendance sheet stand out.
How to make an attendance sheet
Using an attendance sheet template can help you to make an attendance sheet easily. You can customize the attendance sheet template in Google Sheets or Excel with your students’ or employees’ data, saving you time making the columns yourself.
Some people even choose to use Google Docs or Microsoft Word to make their attendance sheet page, but this can be more time-consuming. Using software such as Google Docs or Word does allow for customization and ease of access, however, and these tools can be great to record class data.
Personally, I recommend using a spreadsheet maker such as Excel or Google Sheets to make an attendance tracker template and record attendance online.
How to make an attendance spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets
You can use a Google Sheets attendance template or an Excel template and simply input the data as a spreadsheet this way.
Alternatively, you can make an attendance sheet template using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. I have included the steps to do this below.
- Add the number of sheets you would like. For example, if you are using a monthly attendance sheet spreadsheet, then you would add 12 sheets.
- Enter the students’ or employees’ names in alphabetical order, beginning in cell A3.
- Type two names but put the last name first. Retype the first name with the last name first in cell B3. You can then do the same thing with the second name, in cell B4.
- Use Flash Fill. To do this, simply highlight cells B3 and B4 and then click the ‘Home’ tab. Using the edition section of the ribbon, click the ‘Fill’ icon and choose ‘Flash Fill.’ This will automatically fill column B with the last names first.
- Add the columns you need to the spreadsheet. You can create a title in cell A1, and type ‘Name’ in cell A2. Then, using the cells in row 2, you can type the days of the week, and any other information you want to include.
- Merge the title cells. Highlight from cell A1 to the last title you entered in row 2. Then, right-click and select ‘Format Cells.’ Click the ‘Alignment’ tab and choose ‘Merge Cells.’
- Add the finishing touches. Click the ‘View’ tab and choose ‘Page Layout.’ This will help you see how the attendance sheet will look on A4 paper. After this, you can color the cells using the ‘Fill’ icon on the ‘Home’ tab.
- Print your attendance sheet. Click ‘File,’ and then ‘Print’ to print your attendance sheet from Excel or Google Sheets.
Using an attendance sheet template will help you to save time making an attendance sheet manually using a spreadsheet maker, such as Excel or Google Sheets.
Instead, you can edit and customize the attendance sheet template using Excel or Google Sheets to include your classes and their data, making attendance templates an easy option for busy teachers and managers.
