From Term 1 2025, your Student Management System (SMS) automatically submits attendance data to the Ministry every day at 6pm. This is not a suggestion. It is a statutory requirement under the Education and Training Act 2020 and the Education (School Attendance) Regulations 2024. The system is designed for surveillance, not support. Your compliance is now a binary, daily data point.

The Audit Trigger

Auditors do not need to visit your school to find you. The Ministry’s system generates automated data quality reports every fortnight. A single missing National Student Number (NSN) in your submission flags an error. Incorrect use of the prescribed attendance codes—’J’ for justified, ‘U’ for unjustified—creates an inconsistency trail. These reports are the audit trigger. They signal a school where processes are manual, staff are untrained, or leadership is indifferent. Failure to correct flagged errors “as soon as possible” is an admission your system is broken.

The Regulatory Hook

The law demands more than data entry. Your Board of Trustees must have written attendance procedures. These must be provided to students, parents, and caregivers. Crucially, you must “reflect on attendance issues at least every 6 months” and use the data “as a basis for strengthening student engagement.” This is the regulatory hook. If your pastoral care team operates in a silo, disconnected from the daily SMS data, you are non-compliant. If you receive the Ministry’s “Every Day Matters” report at term’s end and have no documented evidence of reviewing it or acting on its insights, you have failed a direct Cabinet-mandated transparency test.