Search for ACELS attendance requirements and you find almost nothing written for the person who has to comply with them. Which is odd, because the rules are published and specific, and a Director of Studies can audit their own registers against them in an afternoon.

The reason nobody writes it is that the answer is awkward: ACELS does not set the attendance numbers. Three bodies set three parts of the same obligation, and the school is inspected on all of them. This article separates them, quotes each one, links the source, and turns it into a list you can run your own records against.

Requirements last verified on 20 August 2026 against the documents linked below. Irish English language regulation is mid-transition and the schemes referenced here are changing — verify against the current version of each document before acting on it.

Who actually sets the attendance rules

An Irish English language school lives under three separate instruments, and only one of them is ACELS.

So the honest answer to "what are the ACELS attendance requirements" is that most of what people mean by the phrase lives in a Department of Justice document. If you are preparing for an inspection by reading only your accreditation paperwork, you are reading the wrong file.

The numbers, and where each one comes from

85% minimum attendance

The ILEP criteria are direct about it: "Providers must have mandatory attendance requirements of a minimum 85% attendance for all enrolled students. The system of taking and recording attendance must be documented and publicly available."

Two obligations in one sentence, and schools reliably meet the first and forget the second. The threshold is a provider requirement, not just a student one — and the system of taking and recording attendance has to be written down and published, not merely operated.

What counts as attending: the 15-minute rule

This is the requirement that quietly breaks paper registers. Attendance is defined as attending the full designated tuition hours: arriving more than 15 minutes late, or leaving before the class has concluded, means the student is marked absent for that class or class segment. The criteria add that the leeway "should not be adopted by providers as a mechanism for allowing students to regularly arrive late without being marked absent."

A tick in a box cannot represent that. If your register records presence rather than presence-with-a-time, you have no way to apply the rule consistently and no way to show an inspector that you did.

The six-week trigger

Where a student has 25% or more uncertified absence in the first six weeks of their programme, this must be communicated to Immigration Service Delivery, together with the attendance policy being applied in that instance and what measures have been taken to address the non-attendance.

This is a monitoring obligation with a clock on it: you have to be able to compute a rolling per-student percentage in week six without anyone remembering to look. And there is no way back — the criteria state there is no permitted mechanism for making up uncertified absences through additional classes, during or after the programme. Where a student cannot reach 85% before the programme ends, they must be told, and that must also be communicated to ISD.

The numbers your register has to be consistent with

Registers are read against the programme structure, so the surrounding numbers matter: at least 15 hours of timetabled contact per week excluding breaks, a minimum of 25 weeks within a 7-month period totalling at least 375 tuition hours, and full-time daytime attendance between 9am and 5pm on at least four days from Monday to Friday. No more than 15 students may be listed on a class attendance list or physically present in the class.

A register showing 16 names, or a class outside those hours, is a finding before anyone counts a single absence.

What the record itself has to do

Recorded in every class, by the teacher

The criteria allow the system to be "manual, electronic or a mix" — nobody is required to buy software. What is required is that attendance be recorded in each class, and that class teachers also record the overall number of students in attendance. That second half is a deliberate cross-check: a headcount that disagrees with the sum of the ticks is exactly what a reconciliation is meant to surface.

Twelve months for paper — and the reconciliation it implies

The most quoted line, and the most misread: "Manual attendance sheets must be retained by the provider for a minimum of 12 months for inspection and will be checked against any computer records."

Read it carefully. It is a floor for paper, not a ceiling for anything, and it explicitly anticipates that your paper and your digital record will be compared. A school that takes attendance on paper and later types it into a spreadsheet has manufactured precisely the discrepancy the sentence exists to catch — and the person doing the typing is usually the one least able to explain a gap six months later.

QQI points the same way. The ELE Code of Practice requires all records for administration, accounts, staff and learners to be "securely stored on the management system", with role-restricted access, a back-up document store in case that system fails, and GDPR compliance throughout. The QA Guidelines make academic managers responsible for monitoring all academic administrative documentation, "which is stored on the school management system". The regulator is not neutral about where the record lives.

A named person and a published policy

The ILEP criteria require a documented, public policy on punctuality and attendance naming the responsible person and the penalties for lateness, with the records available for inspection by or submission to ISD. A parallel requirement covers absenteeism and expulsion: who records absences, how a student can have one certified, at which point expulsion steps activate, and a progressive process giving at least two warnings and a chance to respond first. All standard correspondence in that process must be retained.

One staffing rule is easy to miss and hard to unwind: administrative positions in any management role with responsibility for non-EEA students, attendance records or the attendance system must not be filled by non-EEA students.

The copy the learner leaves with

QQI's QA Guidelines require that learners are informed of your document storage systems, including storage of attendance and assessment records — and that a visa-holding learner moving to another provider or on to a higher education programme is given the documentation they need, attendance records included, by their final day of study with you. If producing one leaver's full history is a two-day job, that requirement is already failing quietly.

What an inspection asks to see

The Department of Justice and the GNIB reserve the right to conduct unannounced inspections of ILEP-listed providers at any time. The criteria publish a non-exhaustive list of what monitoring activity looks for, and attendance appears in it as "Records of attendance monitoring and details of warnings and expulsions" — the warnings and expulsions sitting alongside the register, not separately from it.

The same list includes student numbers and completion rates per programme, evidence of registration for end-of-course examinations, and the documented policies themselves. The register is read against the enrolment record, the timetable and the exam record — and three files describing the same student and disagreeing is a worse position than one file with an acknowledged gap.

What changes in 2026

This is the part worth knowing before you invest in a process. Per QQI's guidance for English language education providers, ACELS is being discontinued and replaced by TrustEd Ireland, the statutory International Education Mark. There is no automatic transition — an ACELS-accredited provider that wants the mark completes the full application, and one that does not apply loses its accreditation when the scheme ends — with a two-year transition period for ACELS providers.

The second application window opened on 1 September 2025, and the ILEP "will cease to operate following the completion of the second TrustEd Ireland window in 2026". After that, only providers authorised to use the mark can recruit non-EU/EEA learners who need study visas or permissions — and QQI states plainly that an applicant must comply with the Department of Justice in monitoring student compliance with immigration law.

So the attendance obligation is not going away with the ILEP. It is moving into a scheme whose statutory guidelines already assume the records live on a management system.

Audit your own records against this

Take one student who has been enrolled for three months, changed level once, and has some absences. Then answer these, with evidence rather than from memory:

  • Can you produce that student's complete attendance history, across the level change, in a few minutes and from one source?

  • Does the register distinguish present, absent, certified absent and late-beyond-15-minutes — or only present and absent?

  • What is their attendance percentage today, and who would have noticed if it had crossed 25% uncertified absence in week six?

  • If you take paper, does the paper agree with whatever it was typed into? When was that last checked?

  • Is there a register for every class that ran last week, including the ones a substitute covered?

  • Is your attendance policy published, and does it name the person responsible?

  • Could a learner leaving on Friday be handed their attendance record on Friday?

Each question maps to something above. Any "no" is a finding waiting for a date.

What this looks like with a proper system

None of the requirements name a product, and a disciplined paper process can satisfy them. What a system changes is the number of places a record can go missing between the class and the file.

The properties that map to the rules above are specific: registers generated from the actual timetable, so a class that ran cannot lack one; capture in the room with a timestamp, so the 15-minute rule is a fact rather than a judgement; a per-student percentage that is always current, so week six is a threshold rather than a memory; a level change that continues one history instead of splitting it in two; corrections logged with author and time; and a per-student export a leaver can be handed on their last day. Attendance connected to the academic record is what makes the register agree with the enrolment and exam records rather than merely coexist with them.

This is why KMPUS was built for language academies rather than adapted from a K-12 system: rolling intakes and mid-course level changes are the two things that break attendance history, and in ELT they are the normal case. NED College, an Irish institution running roughly 1,500 students across Dublin and Limerick, is the scale at which "which classes have no register this week" stops being answerable by asking around. If that is your real question, the mechanics are in our guide to automated attendance for language academies — this article is what you are measured against, that one is how to stop measuring by hand.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ACELS attendance requirement?
Strictly, ACELS accredits the organisation. The 85% minimum attendance figure that schools mean by the phrase comes from the Department of Justice ILEP criteria for English language programmes, because attendance is a condition of the student's immigration permission.

How long do we have to keep attendance records?
The ILEP criteria set a minimum of 12 months for manual attendance sheets, retained for inspection and checked against computer records. That is a floor for paper specifically. Your data retention schedule also has to satisfy GDPR and your own accreditation scheme, so treat 12 months as the shortest defensible answer rather than the right one.

Are paper registers still acceptable?
Yes. The criteria explicitly allow a manual, electronic or mixed system. The difficulty is not legality, it is that paper makes the 15-minute rule, the week-six percentage and the per-student export slow — and slow reads as uncertainty during an inspection.

Does the 85% rule apply to EEA students too?
The criterion is written as a provider obligation for "all enrolled students". The consequences attached to it — the reports to ISD, the effect on renewing permission — apply to students whose immigration permission depends on the programme.

Does any of this change when ACELS ends?
The scheme changes, the obligation does not. QQI requires TrustEd Ireland applicants to comply with the Department of Justice on monitoring immigration compliance, and its statutory QA guidelines already require academic administrative documentation to be held on a school management system. Read the source documents linked above rather than a summary, including this one, for any decision that ends in a report.

If you want to test the audit questions above against your own data rather than your memory of it, KMPUS offers a free trial with no credit card.