Five Years Strong: How Our Partnership with Wonde Is Powering Better Attendance Monitoring for Virtual Schools

Posted by on 14th May 2025

At Welfare Call, our mission has always been clear: support Virtual Schools and Local Authorities to safeguard vulnerable children and improve outcomes. A core part of that mission is ensuring the data we collect is accurate, secure, and timely because when it comes to attendance and exclusions, insight needs to lead to action.

That’s why we’re proud to celebrate five years of successful partnership with Wonde, which has been instrumental in helping us deliver one of the most reliable and robust attendance monitoring solutions available to Virtual Schools across the country.

A Partnership Built on Precision and Trust

Since 2020, we’ve worked with Wonde to automatically extract data from school MIS systems, and together we’ve continued to refine and evolve our processes year after year. Our shared goal: to ensure Virtual School Heads and their teams get the most accurate, relevant, and up-to-date attendance information possible.

Our collaboration has led to some significant milestones:

  • Connection to over 4,000 education provisions across the UK

  • Bespoke data extraction protocols developed just for Welfare Call

  • A hybrid model of automatic extraction and dedicated school calling

  • Daily and real-time access to actionable insights for Local Authorities

This partnership is more than just technical integration; it’s a joint effort to deliver better outcomes for children by giving Virtual Schools the tools and intelligence they need to act early and act effectively.

Custom-Built for Confidence

We know that trust is everything when it comes to managing sensitive data. That’s why we commissioned Wonde to develop bespoke coding tailored exclusively for Welfare Call. This means we can guarantee schools, with 100% certainty, that we only connect and collect data for the children we are legally mandated to support.

This commitment to safeguarding and privacy underpins our entire approach. Schools can remain confident that their data is secure, appropriate, and used only in the service of helping the children who need it most.

Why Attendance Monitoring Matters

For Virtual Schools and Local Authorities, attendance is often the first signal that something’s not right in a child’s life. Our Attendance Monitoring solution is designed to ensure that those signals aren’t missed.

By combining automated extraction via Wonde with our dedicated calling team, we give Local Authorities the full picture:

  • Real-time updates on school attendance

  • Contextual information from schools

  • Visibility of exclusions and persistent absence

  • Trends across cohorts, schools, year groups, and placement types

This data isn’t just nice to have, it’s vital. It enables Local Authorities to:

  • Intervene early where problems emerge
  • Monitor the impact of support strategies
  • Reduce absenteeism
  • Understand the reasons behind non-attendance
  • Strengthen safeguarding responses

And because everything is integrated into our Analytics platform, users can access rich, interactive dashboards that allow them to drill down, cross-examine, and uncover patterns at both individual and cohort level.

A Flexible Approach That Works for You

We know that no two Local Authorities work the same way. That’s why our ethos is always to build solutions that work for you, not the other way around.

Some authorities prefer fully automated data extraction via Wonde. Others opt for our calling service, which provides added context and reassurance. Many choose a hybrid model, getting the best of both worlds.

Whatever the setup, the result is the same: accurate, timely, and trusted attendance data that you can act on.

Looking Ahead

As we enter our fifth year of partnership with Wonde, we’re not standing still. We’re continuing to invest in the technology, processes, and partnerships that make this solution stronger year after year.

Together with Wonde, and in collaboration with our growing network of Local Authorities and Virtual Schools, we’re helping to build a smarter, faster, and more responsive approach to safeguarding and supporting some of the most vulnerable children in the education system.

If you’d like to find out more about how our attendance monitoring model can work for your Virtual School, contact your account manager today.